Hello everyone and welcome to a series of lessons on graph analytics with Neo4j. In this first tutorial we are going to go briefly through the process of downloading and installing Neo4j, and then we'll go ahead and run Neo4j and provide a brief review of the Neo4j graphical interface. So, let's get started. To download Neo4j, you'll want to browse to neo4j.com, and once you're at that URL, you should see a webpage similar to this. Neo4j typically will detect which operating system you're running, but if you want to download other versions of Neo4j, click this link in the upper right-hand corner to download Neo4j. We're going to use the community edition, so we'll click this link right here. But if you'd like to explore other releases, you can click the link down here. When we click the Download Community Edition link, Neo4j should automatically begin the download. There are versions of Neo4j for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Neo4j is developed with the Java programming language, so you'll want to be sure you have the minimum system requirements to run Neo4j. We'll provide a link to those system requirements in the resources of this video. This example is with the Mac OS X operating system. And we've downloaded the .dmg file and we can click to open that. And as is the case with the Mac applications to install is very straightforward. We'll just click and drag this icon into the Applications folder and that should automatically install. Once the application is installed, we should see it listed in the Applications folder. So let's go ahead and run Neo4j. To run Neo4j, you'll just double-click on the application's icon. Neo4j is browser-based, so it launches a web server, and it launches a URL specific to Neo4j. So to activate that server we'll click the Start button. If it's your first time using Neo4j then you probably won't have any graph databases available to open, so Neo4j makes it easy for you by providing a default graph database of movie data. To run Neo4j, you click this link and that should launch your default browser. Installation on Windows should be just as straightforward as OS X. You'll click the same Download Neo4j button and when the download page opens, you'll click Download Community Edition. Neo4j should recognize you're running Windows and should download an executable. Once that downloads we can run it and we'll step through the same steps which are typical for a Windows operating system. Now I already have Neo4j installed in my Windows system so I will be updating my existing installation. And Neo4j downloads a Java jar file. Once the application's installed it will open the dialog box and we can start up our web server. And the same URL is available and when we click that, our default browser should be launched and we should see the same interface we see In OS X. You should be able to subsequently run neo4j by accessing the executable in the Windows Start menu. So let's take a look at the neo4j interface. As I mentioned previously, neo4j is a browser-based application. So once the application launches it should open your default browser and in my case, I'm using the Chrome browser. And you should see a URL like this in the address bar. Most browsers provide a full-screen viewing mode, so I'm going to go ahead and activate that, in this case, what Chrome calls presentation mode. The interface for neo4j consists of three main areas. There's the command line along the top where you can issue commands and you can paste content into the command line and execute multiple lines at one time. You can specify these commands to be one of your favorites. You can clear the command box. And you can run, or execute, the commands with the Play button. On the left-hand side is an expandable and collapsible panel that provides supplementary information about the database you're currently working with. There's an option to list your favorites, and Neo4j provides an initial default listing of favorites. And there's supplementary information and links to references and examples and tutorials and so on. You can also modify the configuration of your Neo4j installation for your particular user. And there's additional information about the application. The third area is the main panel in the middle where the results of all of the commands that you execute are displayed. In fact, this panel itself has been generated by issuing a command, which is displayed in the very top of the panel. The command is ;play start. In fact, if I type that command into my command line I should be able to generate a duplicate of that panel, and sure enough, there it is. The upper right-hand corner of these panels I can pin the panel to my webpage, and I can do this with as many panels as I want and the window will simply allow me to scroll up and down. I can view this particular panel full screen. Or it can cancel or close it, which is what I'm going to do. Now you can see neo4j makes it very easy to learn all about graph analytics. So let's go ahead and get started with learning how to create and modify our first graph network.
