Introduction
Rexster is a multi-faceted graph server with direct support for searching, ranking, scoring, and more specifically, recommendation. Rexster is generally communicated with over HTTP, but also has the beginnings of a binary protocol which currently has support through Rexster Console. Requests trigger stored traversals that are identified by URIs and are parametrized by the query parameter component of the URI. Rexster primarily responds to requests with results represented as JSON documents. Rexster is highly extensible through Rexster Extensions making it possible to expose new kinds of functionality within its container. The general system architecture is diagrammed below.
Rexster makes extensive use of Blueprints. Blueprints, amongst other things, is a collection of graph-based interfaces (e.g. graph, vertex, edge, etc.) and their implementations (e.g. Neo4j, OpenRDF, etc.). The benefit is that Rexster can be used with various graph backends by providing “plug and play” support. Two useful TinkerPop products that make use of Blueprints are
- Gremlin is a general-purpose, graph-based programming language
- Pipes is a data processing framework that has support for processing Blueprints-based graphs.
Rodriguez, M.A., Neubauer, P., The Graph Traversal Pattern, AT&Ti and NeoTechnology Technical Report, April 2010.
Rodriguez, M.A., Allen, D.W., Shinavier, J., Ebersole, G., A Recommender System to Support the Scholarly Communication Process, KRS-2009-02, April 2009.
Rodriguez M.A., Shinavier, J., Exposing Multi-Relational Networks to Single-Relational Network Analysis Algorithms, Journal of Informetrics, volume 4, number 1, pages 29-41, ISSN:1751-1577, Elsevier, doi:10.1016/j.joi.2009.06.004, LA-UR-08-03931, December 2009.