I am having trouble visualizing a Graph Database.
Visualizing an RDBMS is really very simple and I was able to understand from the first tutorial itself when I started learning it some 4-5 years ago.
But I am not able to understand Graph Databases.
I am also unable to get any good links on this topic, hence posting this question here.
Specifically, I am looking for the following:
Some really simple book/link on Graph Dbs
Atleast some knowledge on the implementation details of a Graph DB (I hope all Graph DBs would be having atleast a few basic things in common).
Thanks a lot in advance guys,
Protoge is your best bet to get started understanding ontologies.
IsaVis is a pretty common tool for visualizing you db.
Jena and Sesame are you best bets for implementations (both in java) but for prototyping python rocks and rdflib is the must use tool there.
There are plenty of others out there but those are my suggested entry vehicles. YMMV
Neo4j did a quite good job for me explaining the concept. Also starting with it to test is quite easy to do. You could start here:
http://neo4j.org/learn/
Related
I am currently thinking of undertaking the task specified in the title for one of the Lisp languages (most likely Common Lisp). However, I have no idea about what is involved.
Hence, I am asking this question. What are the steps for writing a DB driver in general and MongoDB driver in particular? Having briefly looked for some tutorials, it appears that there is a bit of a dearth in that realm.
Could someone point me to some resources on this? Does MongoDB have documentation/API on this?
P.S. If this question is better suited for another Stackexchange site, I will be happy to move it.
I'm starting a project for a small private pre-K/kindergarten school (owned by my wife's family), and I'm wondering if there's a better way to do this than starting from scratch. Perhaps someone can point me in a good direction before I spin my wheels too much.
The main reason I took this on is to learn about the process, so if anyone is suggesting I get started in Rails or something, I'm quite happy to do that, but on the other hand if there's something out of the box out there that's in the ballpark similar to Wordpress, it might be better to go with what works before getting in over my head.
I'm not a complete noob in that I understand the basics of databse normalization and I'm quite proficient with VBA, and I'm hoping to come away from this with more knowledge about web applications and having done something useful for the school. Can anyone help me get started with this (admittedly very vaguely described) project?
Thanks for your time!
You could try web2py. I used it for developing a small web application and it proved quick and relatively easy. It follows the MVC (model view controller) paradigm and offers good database support. It is based on Python, so it is easy enough to get started if you're new to programming at all.
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I've been lurking around for several weeks and have been totally blown away by the amount of information and how the community quickly responds. I have noticed that questions like this typically receive sarcastic remarks and sometimes get down voted. Please bear with me as I attempt my first post :)
I little background..
I work at a tiny software company as the "QA department". Our application has a MS SQL back to store customer data and short term loan information for financial service companies. I started working here 6 years ago as a gernal technician to provide support for their call center, so I've been overly exposed to SQL and have become fairly familiar with working with it. You probably wouldn't pay me to develop a enterprise level database, but at this point I've become familiar enough to do most things in SQL.
Why I'm asking my question..
I want to develop an application to store and track our software issues and new dev. I've done research on this website along with asking around and I still feel sort of lost as to which direction I should take. I want the core of the application to be pretty basic at first, to provide various screens between my entities/modules and to create reports to show their various relationships. In the future I want it to be more complex, to provide a web portal of some sort and to start getting into various complex QA software concepts. I've read around and it sounds like I might want some variation of C/VB for the windows portion, but all of the topics have sort of overwhelmed me. Do I want to start with a more basic one that was created 20 or 30 years ago? (I think that's C and C++, right?) or a more recent one like C#? Will I be able to develop a web portal with both of these? (by web portal I'm thinking it would provide access to our database of defects and have username/password sign-in). I've seen that the various .NET languages lean more towards web development, should I start with one of these?
I am at the very beginning of this and I fully understand that I'm jumping into some deep waters here. I want to make sure I don't end up spinning my wheels and that I focus my energy on something that won't end up being a bad idea in 1 or 2 years after I start. So far I've found this website very helpful, if I can pick a direction I know I won't have any problems finding what the next step is. It might help to know that I have no formal or informal programming background (if it wasn't obvious). I'm a 27yo techie who is starting his first venture into programming, go easy on me! Thanks for taking the time to read this :)
I won't recommend that you go to C, C++, or VB. C and C++ are used mainly for developement of system software, compilers, etc. VB is deprecated by now; there is a .net version VB.NET, but my preference is C#.
Looks like you are a Microsoft shop. Steer youself towards using C#. Visual Studio provides great support for development of Web Applications with support for holding state in entities backed by MS SQL.
I would start with a simple example as given in MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd410597.aspx.
This example uses an Model View Controller based framework that is fairly easy to configure and use. They have great examples.
There is a free framework that also supports MS SQL Entity store http://www.coderun.com/ide/
Enjoy
Don't write a line of code. There are literally hundreds of open source and commercial software packages that already do what you want to do. You'd be better of spending time researching them and finding the package that most closely meets your requirements. A good solution will also be extensible enough that you'll be able to modify it to meet all of your requirements.
Since you work for a small company I can guarantee you that using your limited development hours "writing your own" will be counterproductive. You'd be better off adopting something off the shelf and becoming proficient at it. You'll learn more about developing systems like this once you've become intimately familiar with one of them.
Check out JIRA or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems for some other ideas.
For the benefit of your company I would recommend to use an existing
solution. But if you want to learn and build something of your own, I
would suggest that you check out some popular web application
frameworks, like:
Django
Ruby On Rails
Zend
Good Luck with your project!
Given that your intent is to learn and create something yourself I think you should consider a LAMP stack and PHP with one of the PHP frameworks on top (Cake PHP, code-igniter or the like).
The C++ route is a long hard way (C++ is my language of choice) to learn; as a learning experience I think you will get quicker and more satisfying results with PHP.
I also think that this is a realistic project for someone of your skills over a period of a 6 to 12 months - start with a simple requirement and then build it up to have all the features you need.
If you just want a bug tracking system obviously there are many options that won't demand any development.
How much experience do you have with things like installing Linux, Apache, Mysql, etc? If you are completely new to this, then this will be a much tougher task, because there are many layers you'll have to learn before you can even get to the point of writing an end-to-end application.
I would avoid C/C++/C# because there are a lot of things you would need to learn about basic programming before you even got to the stage where you could make database calls.
On the assumption that you don't have experience with LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/(Perl/Python/PHP)), my suggestion would be to start simply, by using a scripting language like Python or Perl. You can very easily get a database connection, and start writing queries, and extracting data from there. If you are used to Windows, I would install ActivePerl or ActivePython, and start from there. You can start building a command line program that does what you want, and then from there, you can move on to creating a web application that can do something similar.
Building a web application would likely be much easier than writing a Windows application, so after you have gotten comfortable with the scripting language, that's the direction I would go afterwards.
Good luck!
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I need to build a php app, and I was thinking about using a framework (never used one before). I've been browsing around some but most of them seems kinda complicated, I really liked what I saw about Symfony, but it looks like I will have to spend like a month until I really understand how to use it, and in one month I could code the app I have in mind 5 times without a framework. But I want to use one to "standardize" my code and prevent bugs.
So I was wondering if someone could share with me which php frameworks you think are easier to learn how to use.
My application will use mysql, and it will have some sort of "search engine" to search data that will be populated on the database using a few "scraper scripts" (that I also wants to code using the framework).
There are many questions answering this question here on StackOverflow and I was recently just in your position researching many different frameworks as I want to standardize my code as well.
I ended up choosing Codeigniter because I wanted something with good documentation, and that was very light (lighter == easier to understand IMO), and something that was not too strict. In Codeigniter if you really want to you can just code regular PHP and it lets you do that. I like this option because if I really get stuck on something, I just code it in raw PHP the way I know I can. I've only been using Codeigniter for a few weeks but the learning curve isn't too difficult and this is my first framework I've used.
Read through some of the previous discussions, and look out for ease of use advises:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2648/what-php-framework-would-you-choose-for-a-new-application-and-why
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/249984/php-framework-decision-analysis-paralysis
Why do I need to use a popular framework?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/717836/kohana-or-codeigniter
If you want something easy to get started, you might want to look into the minimal frameworks:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/694929/whats-your-no-framework-php-framework
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/141945/lightest-possible-php-mvc
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3023818/any-procedural-non-oo-php-framework
But actually the big dozen are advisable if you want good documentation. Symfony and CakePHP are complex, CodeIgniter and the newer Kohana fork are beginner friendly. While there are many more to choose from. Pick a nice API, and maybe look out for one that explains the difference between MVC and MVP. Also for a lengthy list: http://matrix.include-once.org/framework/
My first choice would be cakePHP. Easy to learn, great documentation, api and a few good books:
Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional – David Golding (good; start with this one!)
Super Awesome Advanced CakePHP Tips – Matt Curry (good and free :-))
Refactoring Legacy Applications Using CakePHP – Chris Hartjes (not read yet)
Practical CakePHP Projects – Kai Chan, John Omokore & Richard Miller (not so usefull)
CakePHP is the best solution with a small learning curve.
I was in your shoes just 2 years ago. I personally chose to use Zend Framework. It's important to understand that ZF is built by the same guys who maintain and improve PHP itself! Just that gives it a lot more credibility.
When choosing a framework you should consider the following:
Size and Quality of the community - Being one of the most widely adopted PHP frameworks, Zend Framework (aka ZF) has the biggest PHP framework community; hence, most of the problems you will encounter will have already been answered. There are frameworks out there that are supported by just a few developers and if they happen to quit working on it, you're stuck with the latest version of the framework. This not likely to happen with ZF.
Documentation and Beginner Friendly - The ZF docs are pretty good, full of examples and beginner friendly. There's also a ton of tutorials and [quick start guides][2]. It's extremely easy to start up a new ZF app.
Investment - Sure you have to invest sometime learning how it works, but everything's like that in the software engineering world. You have to understand [OOP][3] and [MVC][4] before hand as well. Many people don't understand that using a framework to develop procedural-like code (instead of OOP) is defeating the purpose of... using a MVC/OOP framework! Therefore, it's important to grasp and master these concepts so you develop the best code possible. And by best code I mean
a) code that works
b) code that's easy and fast to understand and maintain.
This investment is well worth it since it will drastically increase
a) speed of development
b) speed of debugging and maintenance.
Also, take advantage of this moment in your programming career to also adhere to other common best practices (if you haven't already done so) by using:
a) Unit Tests - incredibly easy to integrate within ZF. Look into [Test Driven Development][5] as well.
b) An IDE - VIM, [Netbeans][6], etc
c) [Design Patterns][7]
d) Source Control - [Mercurial][8], Git, SVN, etc
e) Finally, keep yourself in the loop by [following what's going on the PHP world][9].
You'll thank yourself yourself in your near future! I know I did.
As no-one has voted for Symfony here i will and here's why. There are two types of frameworks, well a whole range actually but in the PHP/MVC area which is where we are in this thread there are Glue and Full Stack frameworks.
Zend and CodeIgniter are Glue and Symfony and Cake are FullStack.
Glue are the ones where you can pick and choose which components you can use and how much "standard" code you can use. These tend to have a gentler learning curve as you can pick the bits you like that help and fill in the more difficult bits with code you know.
FullStack means you need to use the lot and so the learning curve can be quite steep. Also with FullStack there can be a tendency to balk against the way something is implemented rather than just accept and flow with it.
Coming from a write everything myself background i initially favoured the Glue's but have now migrated to FullStack using Symfony 1.4 and 2 and Sinatra and Padrino. The extra speed and power the fullstacks give is not something i would like to give up.
One downside of CI is that it is built for php4 compatibility and so does suffer in a number of structural ways when you come to push the framework, Kohana is a fork that addresses this issue. And i dislike Zend because there are so many ways of doing the same thing that after a while the Framework seems almost irrelevant (Sorry personal rant)
At the end of the day use of a Framework is good because it adds a structure and can be a great aid to learning and the one to choose is the one you feel comfortable and are productive in.
There are many frameworks and several really cool frameworks.
After trying so many of them I think you should not start using any of them before finding best suitable to your needs.
You may find any other after choosing one so do not act quickly before choosing right one.
Before creating an application with a framework you should make exercises.
For me I started with CodeIgniter created one application and left second one in the middle, then passed to Kohana and started second application according to the needs.
CodeIgniter is the one that I prefer
The framework must have little learning and easy to expand. I am using http://sourceforge.net/projects/naanalframework/ for all my projects. There is no installation. Just has to point the frameworks naanal.php in your application's index.php and run it. The framework will guide you what to do. For the beginer, this framework is very useful to develop PHP applications. A sample application also available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/naanalframework/files/sample%20applications/wordpress_plugin_builder.zip/download
Behind the tables and tables of raw data, how does Wolfram Alpha work?
I imagine there are various artificial intelligence mechanisms driving the site but I can't fathom how anyone would put something like this together. Are there any explanations that would help a programmer understand how something like this is created? Does the knowledge base learn on its own or is it taught very specific details in a very organized manner? What kind of structure and language is used to store this type of data?
Obviously this is a huge question and can't fully be answered here but some of the general concepts would be nice to know so I can build off of them and do my own research.
Does the knowledge base learn on its
own or is it taught very specific
details in a very organized manner?
AI systems are usually something distinctly in between. The system will usually learn in a directed way, where the developers can apply a metric that measures the quality of the learning, and the system learns by attempting to maximise that metric. Where the expertise comes in is in developing efficient and effective representations of the data, so that it lends itself to this learning process and to the measurement of how well the learning is going.
Take a look at the API
This official blog post has some portion of the explanation: the language Mathematica.
Looks like a large number of algorithms from which some that might be relevant are selected by pattern matching.