On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Alastair James <al.ja...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Cheers guys. All sounds good. One comment: > > > > As for sorting: yes, that is a comment on the API as a whole. We have > opted > > at not providing sorting, since there are good sorting facilities > available > > in the JRE already. Since that makes it easy for the user to implement > > their > > own sorting it would be sub optimal for Neo4j to provide sorting. Since > > sorting is a costly operation (both in time and space) it should be done > as > > late in the process as possible, probably with a lot of user code in > > between > > the traversal and the place where the sorting actually takes place. This > > has > > been our thinking in the REST API as well, meaning that sorting will be > > left > > to the client. It is possible that we will return to this decision and > add > > sorting to the REST API, and that it might trickle down to the core API. > > Features like this are however much easier to add than to remove, which > is > > why it is not implemented at the moment. > > > > Well, thats the case when Neo is running in the same JVM as the user code, > but when we start talking about returning 1000s of nodes in JSON over HTTP > just to get the first 10 this is clearly sub-optimal (as I build websites > this is a very common use case). So, as you say, sorting and limiting can > wait, but I suspect the HTTP API would benefit from offering it. Limiting > need not require changes to the core API, it could be implemented as a > second stage in the HTTP API code prior to output encoding. > For paging / limiting: yes, you are absolutely right, this would not effect the core API at all, only the REST API. Limiting/paging is something we would probably add to the REST API before sorting. Sorting might be a similar case, but I still think the client would be better fitted to do sorting well. But once paging / limiting is added it would be quite natural / useful to add sorting as well. What I want to avoid is keeping state on the server while waiting for the client to request the next page. Cheers, -- Tobias Ivarsson <tobias.ivars...@neotechnology.com> Hacker, Neo Technology www.neotechnology.com Cellphone: +46 706 534857 _______________________________________________ Neo mailing list User@lists.neo4j.org https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
