Let’s start with the installation of Sparksee graph database. Sparksee only needs to be downloaded and unpacked. Depending on which language you prefer, a few settings or considerations may need to be taken into account too.
By downloading Sparksee you should have received a free personal evaluation license. Learn more about it in the last section of this chapter.
Sparksee is available for several programming languages, so the first thing you should do is download the right package for your development platform.
All the packages can be downloaded here.
Available platforms:
Java developers can also get Sparksee through Apache Maven instead of manually downloading the packages. More information in Sparksee maven project.
Once you have downloaded Sparksee and unpacked it, the content of most packages should look like this:
According to the programming language particularities, some packages may include additional contents.
Unpack the downloaded Sparksee package and it’s ready to be used. No further installation is required, with the exception of Objective-C on MacOS, where an installer is provided to easily copy the framework to the right standard directory.
However, some additional steps can be taken to make Sparksee usage easier for your platform.
All the libraries required to develop a java application with Sparksee are contained in a jar file located at the lib directory (sparkseejava.jar).
If you are not using Maven, you may want to add the path to this file into the CLASSPATH environment variable. However, to avoid any misunderstandings, in this document we will explicitly use the file to compile the examples.
The .NET package contains two subdirectories in the lib directory (windows32 and windows64) for 32 or 64 bit systems. In each one the main library included is sparkseenet.dll. This is the library that you will need to include in your .NET projects.
All the other available libraries in the package are native dlls that sparkseenet.dll must be able to find at run time. Although it is not required, you may want to copy all these libraries to your system folder.
The C++ lib folder contains native libraries for each available platform (Windows 32/64 bits, Linux 32/64 bits, MacOS 64 bits,…).
In Linux and MacOS, you may want to add the path to the correct subdirectory to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH (linux) or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH(MacOS) environment variables.
In Windows you can copy the libraries to the system folders or just be sure to always include them in your projects.
The rest of files included in this package, like the ones in the includes directory, will be needed at compilation time. See Chapter 4.
For iOS you have to uncompress the “.dmg” file to get the Sparksee.framework directory. This directory contains the include files, the static library and the documentation. More information on how to use it can be found on Chapter 4. Please consider using the Objective-C version of Sparksee instead.
Python lib contains the native libraries for each available platform (Windows 32/64 bits, Linux 32/64 bits and MacOS 64 bits) in addition to the Python module.
Make sure to include both the Python module (called sparksee.py) and the wrapper library named "_sparksee" in an accessible folder for Python, please refer to Python module search path for more information about the search path.
The other available library included in Sparksee’s Python distribution is the dynamic native library. This must be located in a specific system directory defined by the following:
For the Objective-C, the content of the dmg file is slightly different because, instead of the lib and doc directories, you will find the Sparksee.framework directory or its installer regarding if its the iOs or MacOS versions. The documentation will be available directly on the framework subdirectory Resources/Documentation.
MacOS
The dmg file for Mac OS contains an installer (SparkseeInstaller.pkg) that you should run. This will extract the framework directory to the right location (/Library/Frameworks/Sparksee.framework).
If you are asked for a target disk, you must choose the main system disk. Your application will depend on the Sparksee dynamic library, so it will need to find it in the right location at runtime.
iOS
The dmg file for iOS contains the Sparksee.framework directory without an installer because there is not the same location restriction as for the MacOS version.
When you build your application the Sparksee library will be embedded; since it’s not a dynamic library framework it doesn’t need to be found at any specific location at runtime.
Every Sparksee download comes with a mail containing a limited personal evaluation license, that must be configured using the provided client identifier and license identifier. The personal evaluation license allows the construction of graphs with up to 1M objects, which is more than enough to construct the example explained in this guide.
If you have commercial interest or need to deal with larger databases, check Sparksee’s website license section for licenses quotation on the latest release of Sparksee.
If you hold a license identifiers, later in this document you will learn how to use your license for a project.