We are extremely excited to announce the latest release of the Neo4j.rb Ruby gems (version 8.0 of neo4j and 7.0 of neo4j-core). With over a year since the last major releases, the new Ruby gems bring a number of big changes. For these versions in particular we had a lot of help from many members of our community with 216 and 445 commits for the neo4j-core and neo4j gems respectively. We'd like to thank GitHub users: ProGM, brucek, klobuczek, jacob-ewald, knapo, and isaacsanders for their commits as well as all of the users who submitted issues and asked questions in our Gitter room, in the #neo4j-ruby channel on the Neo4j Slack group, and on StackOverflow.

The neo4j-core gem

The biggest and most important change to the neo4j-core gem is the addition of support for the binary Bolt protocol introduced in Neo4j 3.0 (older versions of the gems still supported Neo4j 3.0+ via HTTP and embedded modes).

The Neo4j.rb project was originally created as jRuby-only interface to use Neo4j embedded in the Ruby process. When Neo4j introduced it's HTTP JSON APIs, support for HTTP was added in version 3.0 of both gems. With the addition of the bolt protocol, we decided that rather than bolting (get it?) on support that we would rebuild the neo4j-core APIs to create a cleaner, adaptor-based interface for our users. The old API still is available with support for HTTP and embedded modes, but all users are encouraged to adopt the new API.

In the new API, there is no longer an idea of a "current" session (though there is now such a concept in the neo4j gem for ActiveNode and ActiveRel). Because of this users of neo4j-core must retain a reference to the session themselves and must create a new session for each thread if using more than one thread.

Lastly, the new API supports the concept of making more than one query at once, which can allow for batch queries in one http request.

For more details on interface changes, please see our upgrade guide

For more details on all changes, please see the neo4j-core CHANGELOG

The neo4j gem

Of course the 8.0 version of the neo4j gem has been heavily modified to use the new API from neo4j-core 7.0 under the covers. Users of the neo4j gem won't need to change much. Some highlights:

• The server_db mode has been removed and you must specify either http or bolt instead
• When configuring Neo4j in Rails, the session_type, session_url, session_path, and session_options have been removed. This can be fixed by simply replacing the _ with a . (i.e. session.type)
• Outside of Rails the Neo4j::ActiveBase.current_session= and Neo4j::ActiveBase.on_establish_session methods can be used to setup sessions for ActiveNode / ActiveRel
• Magic creation of indexes and constraints defined in ActiveNode models is no longer available. It is suggested that users use our new migrations functionality (helpful errors are raised, but also see this section of our upgrade guide for details).

Again, for more details, please see our upgrade guide

There are many more features to talk about with version 8.0 of the neo4j gem. Some highlights:

• Official Migrations support based off of ActiveRecord's implementation (a huge thanks to ProGM for building this almost entirely single-handedly. See our migrations documentation)
• Support for undeclared properties (see PR #1294 for details. Thanks to klobuczek)
• Support for using Neo4j internal IDs for ActiveNode's' id_property (to be used with care since Neo4j IDs can be recycled. Thanks to klobuczek)

For more details on the many changes changes to the neo4j gem, please see our CHANGELOG