Apache Elevates TinkerPop Graph Computing Framework to Top Level
As we've been reporting, The Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has been elevating a lot of interesting new tools to Top-Level Status recently. The foundation has also made clear that you can expect more on this front, as graduating projects to Top-Level Status helps them get both advanced stewardship and certainly far more contributions.
Now, the foundation has announced that a project called TinkerPop has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). TinkerPop is a graph computing framework that provides developers the tools required to build modern graph applications in any application domain and at any scale.
"Graph databases and mainstream interest in graph applications have seen tremendous growth in recent years," said Stephen Mallette, Vice President of Apache TinkerPop. "Since its inception in 2009, TinkerPop has been helping to promote that growth with its Open Source graph technology stack. We are excited to now do this same work as a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation."
The announcement adds:
"As a graph computing framework for both real-time, transactional graph databases (OLTP) and and batch analytic graph processors (OLAP), TinkerPop is useful for working with small graphs that fit within the confines of a single machine, as well as massive graphs that can only exist partitioned and distributed across a multi-machine compute cluster."
"TinkerPop unifies these highly varied graph system models, giving developers less to learn, faster time to development, and less risk associated with both scaling their system and avoiding vendor lock-in."
The central component to Apache TinkerPop is Gremlin, a graph traversal machine and language, which makes it possible to write complex queries (called traversals) that can execute either as real-time OLTP queries, analytic OLAP queries, or a hybrid of the two.
According to Apache:
"Because the Gremlin language is separate from the Gremlin machine, TinkerPop serves as a foundation for any query language to work against any TinkerPop-enabled system. Much like the Java virtual machine is host to Java, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, and the like, the Gremlin traversal machine is already host to Gremlin, SPARQL, SQL, and various host language embeddings in Python, JavaScript, etc. Once a language is compiled to a Gremlin traversal, the Gremlin machine can evaluate it against a graph database or processor. Instantly, languages such as SPARQL can execute across a one thousand node cluster for long running analytic jobs touching large parts of the graph or sub-second queries within a small neighborhood."
Apache TinkerPop is in use at organizations such as DataStax and IBM, among many others. Amazon.com is currently using TinkerPop and Gremlin to process its order fullfillment graph which contains approximately one trillion edges.
For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache TinkerPop, visit http://tinkerpop.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/apachetinkerpop