On the SitePoint PHP blog they've posted a tutorial from author Tobias Nyholm introducing the Neo4j bundle for Symfony-based application. This bundle provides functionality to work with Neo4j graph databases natively in the application.

There is no such thing as disconnected information, no matter where you look – people, events, places, things, documents, applications and the information about them is all heavily connected. As the volume of data grows, so does the number and dynamicity of its connections. And if you’ve tried in the past to store and query that highly connected, semi-structured data in any database, you probably experienced a lot of challenges.

The tutorial talks some about graph databases, how they work and what kind of data fits into them best. It also briefly covers the Cypher Query Language followed by an introduction to the bundle and what it has to offer. Code examples of putting the bundle to use for queries are provided including the models to handle the results, relationships and an example application you can use to start with a working example.

On the Symfony Finland site there's a new post providing some examples of how the Symfony framework is staying relevant with new technologies and trends that have emerged recently in the web development world.

Symfony2 just turned five years old some months ago. This is an eternity in the web world and you average technology stack has likely grown in complexity since then. In addition to the standard components in LAMP you'll likely be peddling with a number of complementary technologies.

[...] The stability and flexibility have enabled Symfony to take hold also in more conservative industries like travel, where the backend systems are critical. [...] Next let's take a few options that developers of contemporary web applications may choose to adopt in their Symfony full stack framework applications when needed.

The post covers three "in style" technologies and how the Symfony framework (and community) are keeping pace:

• React.js Server Side Rendering with ReactBundle
• GraphQL APIs with the GraphQLBundle
• An Graph Database storage layer using Neo4j over PHP OGM

Each point includes a bit of information about both the technology and the related bundle with plenty of links to other resources and tutorials.

In the latest post to the SitePoint PHP blog Christophe Willensen shows you how to use PHP and the Neo4j graph database to make efficient user timelines in your application. In this case, "timeline" should be thought of as something like a Twitter or Facebook status update feed.

Any social application you encounter nowadays features a timeline, showing statuses of your friends or followers generally in a descending order of time. Implementing such a feature has never been easy with common SQL or NoSQL databases. Complexity of queries, performance impacts increasing with the number of friends/followers and difficulties to evolve your social model are points that graph databases are eliminating. In this tutorial, we’re going to extend the demo application used by the two introduction articles about Neo4j and PHP.

He starts off with a look at how to model the timeline in the graph database, showing different methods to create the relationships: one a direct user-to-post and the other via a linked list. He goes through the initial setup of the codebase and the sample dataset to populate the Neo4j database. He then includes code samples showing how to get the latest feed items for a user and displaying the results in a simple template (Twig-based). He also shows how to get the latest posts for the timeline and how to add a new post.

The SitePoint PHP blog continues their series about combining PHP and the Neo4j graph database with part two, adding social features to the code they created in part one.

In the last part, we learned about Neo4j and how to use it with PHP. In this post, we’ll be using that knowledge to build a real Silex-powered social network application with a graph database.

Author Christophe Willemsen dives right back into the code showing how to get the basic application up and running (using Silex, Twig, Bootstrap and the NeoClient). He loads the PHP libraries up via Composer and injects the NeoClient instance into the application. He includes the view and controller handling for each of the pages:

• a main all user list
• showing who a user follows
• listing suggested users (who to follow)
• adding a relationship

Screenshots are also included to show the example output along with all the code you'll need.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a post today about combining PHP and Neo4j, a popular graph database, and create a simple application.

In this post, we’ll be learning about Neo4j, the leading graph database, and ways to use it with PHP. In a followup post, we’ll be building a proper graph application powered by Silex. [...] For the newcomers, here is a short introduction to graph databases and Neo4j, apart from the theoretical glance we threw at it last year.

For those not familiar with some of the concepts behind graph databases, they start with a quick introduction. They illustrate the concept of relationships with a few helpful images. They also cover the basics of Cypher, the language used in Neo4j database queries. They then show how to get the Neoxygen components installed to talk with the Neo4j database (via an HTTP API) and configuring a basic connection. The remainder of the post shows how to insert data into the database, including relationships, and pulling that information back out via PHP.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today they've posted a new tutorial by Mehul Jain about combining PHP and Neo4J, a popular graph database tool as an alternative to the typical table-driven database structure. This is the first part of a series and only explains some of the basics behind the technology. The actual PHP implementation comes next.

For a long time, data has been typically stored in tabular form so as to increase the indexing and readability. Nowadays, the trends are changing as Graph databases are quickly gaining popularity. In fact, it would not be wrong to call them "the future of DBMS". New to the world of graphs and databases? Don't worry, by the end of this introductory article you will have sound theoretical knowledge about the topic – just enough to easily glide through the rest of the series – actual implementation.

He starts with the basics - introducing the ideas behind graph databases and some of the most basic concepts behind them. He continues, looking at common uses for them including dealing with connected data and how it lets you "move through" the data rather than jumping from record to record. He includes some real world examples if this kind of data ranging from social networks to network management.

On DZone.com today they've posted the second part of their series looking at using the Neo4j database from your PHP applications.

This is Part 2 of a series on setting up a development environment for building projects using the graph database Neo4j and PHP. In Part 1 of this series, we set up unit test and development databases. In this part, we'll build a skeleton project that includes unit tests, and a minimalistic user interface.

The post includes the code to create the testing harness, a bootstrap file and a basic test to handle the checks on deletion of an "Actor". The rest of the post shows how to use the connection to find an Actor based on input from the user via a form.

In a follow up to his previous post on using Neo4j with PHP, Josh Adell looks in a bit more detail about how to find paths in the data via a REST interface to the database.

The thing that makes graphing databases useful is the ability to find relationship paths from one node to another. There are many algorithms for finding paths efficiently, depending on the use case.

He includes some code showing the REST request (made via this client) to fetch these street-based relationships. He then creates a little sample script that provides driving directions from one intersection to another with a "findPathsTo" call. He modifies it a bit later on to use the Dijkstra algorithm.

Josh Adell has written up a new post for his blog showing some of his experience connecting PHP to Neo4j, a graph database (and open source project). It helps to solve a problem of related datasets and the difficulties that traditional RDBMS have with them.

Lately, I've been playing around with the graph database Neo4j and its application to certain classes of problems. Graph databases are meant to solve problems in domains where data relationships can be multiple levels deep. [...] As you continue to add degrees, the query becomes increasingly unwieldy, harder to maintain, and less performant.

Graph databases, like Neo4j, handle these sorts of needs perfectly. There wasn't an official PHP interface for it, so he decided to create his own that worked with the REST interface the database provides. He includes a few code snippets showing how to connect and make a few requests - setting properties on objects, relating objects to one another and making queries that follow the paths from user to user and return them as a simple array.