Interactive Graph Shell CLIs

1.7 Interactive Graph Shell CLIs

Both the Oracle Graph server and client packages contain interactive command-line applications for interacting with the Java APIs and the Python APIs of the product, locally or on remote computers.

The interactive graph shells dynamically interpret command-line inputs from the user, execute them by invoking the underlying functionality, and can print results or process them further. The graph shells provide a lightweight and interactive way of exercising graph functionality without creating a Java or Python application.

The graph shells are especially helpful if you want to do any of the following:

Quickly run a "one-off" graph analysis on a specific data set, rather than creating a large application
Run getting started examples and create demos on a sample data set
Explore the data set, trying different graph analyses on the data set interactively
Learn how to use the product and develop a sense of what the built-in algorithms are good for
Develop and test custom graph analytics algorithms

The graph shell for the Java API (OPG4J) is implemented on top of the Java Shell tool (JShell). As such, it inherits all features provided by JShell such as tab-completion, history, reverse search, semicolon inference, script files, and internal variables. The graph shell for the Python API (OPG4Py) uses IPython in case it is installed.

The following sections explain in detail on how to start the graph shell CLIs: