What's new in TopBraid Suite 3.3

The new 3.3 release of the TopBraid Suite includes significant improvements to TopBraid Composer, TopBraid Ensemble, and TopBraid Live. For more details on the new features, see the Release Notes and detailed change list.

TopBraid Composer

• Release 3.2 let you could run a SPARQLMotion script up to a certain point and then examine the triples that it would have passed along, which was handy for debugging. Release 3.3 brings a real SPARQLMotion debugger, which lets you examine all kinds of useful information at the script breakpoint: variable bindings, the arguments passed to the current module, the result of test queries entered at the break point, and the engine's execution plan. This will make development of more sophisticated SPARQLMotion scripts much easier.

• More automated handling of taxonomies and other controlled vocabularies stored using the SKOS standard.

• Improved OWL 2 support.

• The introduction of UISPIN, a SPARQL-based framework for describing user interfaces. Just as SPIN let you define business rules and application logic, UISPIN lets you describe an application's visual presentation, all with RDF and standard SPARQL underneath, and TopBraid 3.3 lets you see that definition in action. A recent blog posting by Holger Knublauch describes a sample application.

• For customers with complex policies on the use of open source software, the new TBC Clear and TBC-ME Clear versions of TopBraid Composer come with open source components (outside of Eclipse and Jena) unbundled, letting you select the components to add back in according to your needs and policies.

TopBraid Ensemble

• The new Application Event Dashboard makes it much easier to track which events are used by which form components.

• Release 3.3 gives you greater control over form appearance. You can hide component tabs and resizing dividers, and new components make it easier to add white space and formatted text.

• The form component's "Edit Mode" lets TopBraid Ensemble application developers offer their end users new options in how they edit data in forms.

• When SPARQLMotion scripts triggered from TopBraid Ensemble generate HTML documents, they can be displayed in the browser automatically.

• When someone is using an Ensemble application, the displayed URL can be used to record and reproduce the state of the application at that point.

• A new Flex Developer's Guide shows how to make your own components to incorporate into your TopBraid Ensemble applications.

• The new Basket component works like TopBraid Composer's Basket view, serving as a "scratch pad" for resources.

TopBraid Live

Release 3.3 of TopBraid Live gives server administrators greater control over running sessions and the relationship of file resources to the URIs used to identify with them. URI conflicts and missing imports are easier to identify and resolve, and multiuser change propagation and file indexes are also easier to manage from the Server Administration Console.

SPARQLMotion

The SPARQLMotion debugger mentioned above is built into TopBraid Composer. You can execute SPARQLMotion scripts to drive the execution of application logic on a TopBraid Live server from both TopBraid Composer and from TopBraid Ensemble, so improvements to SPARQLMotion capabilities benefit the entire TopBraid Suite. Release 3.3 makes several new things possible with SPARQLMotion scripts:

• A spellchecker accepts blocks of text and returns triples that identify words not found in its configurable dictionary, along with suggested corrections.

• For added flexibility in the use of SPARQLMotion modules, arguments passed to them can now be SPARQL expressions, SELECT queries, or SPIN templates.

• New SPIN functions let you build unique URIs and compute AVG, MIN, MAX aggregations and more from the SPARQL queries in your scripts.

• The cache-all option speeds the use of queries against disk-based databases.

Considering that it's a minor upgrade, there are a lot of new toys to play with!