TopBraid release 3.3: three things that have already made my application development easier

TopBraid Suite Release 3.3 has many features that let you add new things to the semantic web applications that you develop. As I've worked lately on some client application development, three new features in particular have made this work go more quickly and easily.

SPARQLMotion debugger

The SPARQLMotion debugger lets you set breakpoints and examine variables like any other debugger. It also lets you enter SPARQL queries against the data available to the SPARQLMotion module where you set the breakpoint, a feature that has made it much easier for me to understand why a certain module was doing what it was doing instead of what I thought it would be doing. A future entry in this blog will describe the SPARQLMotion debugger in more detail; for now you can get a nice tour from Holger Knublauch's introduction to it.

Base URI Management

Applications typically read and write files, but I sometimes forget that in semantic web application development, the real identifier for a resource such as a file is not its filename, but a URI. After all, you can have several files with the same name in different folders or directories, so a URI should provide a truly unique identifier. If you somehow have the same URI representing more than one file (for example, if you made an alternative copy of your application development folders and used both in the same workspace), this can lead to trouble.

Release 3.3's new "Base URI Management" screen for both the Enterprise Server and Personal Server editions of TopBraid Live lists the URIs of the files and other data resources being tracked in each project and puts a warning icon next to any URI being used for more than one resource. Once you straighten these out by assigning a new base URI to one of the files (or, more likely, by deleting an old file that you had forgotten was there) you'll have much better control over the use of those resources.

Application Event Dashboard

I recently needed to use TopBraid Ensemble's drag and drop capability for an application I was working on. I had never used it before, but instead of pesteringing co-workers to show me an example of drag and drop in action, I opened up the Default TBE application with the kennedys.owl data model, clicked the wrench icon to display the Application Configuration screen, and went to the new Event Wiring screen of the Application Configuration dialog box. After clicking its Display All button, in the top list I saw that for this application the Graph Editor and Query components had Drop listener events defined, and in the bottom list I saw that the Grid and Tree components had Dragging post events defined, so I knew I could drag from a Grid or Tree component to the Graph Editor and Query components in this TBE application. I tried dragging a few resources between these components, and it worked; then I could examine how this was configured and reproduce it in my own application.

It's only been a few weeks since release 3.3 has been out, so I'm sure I'll be growing to appreciate other new features more in the coming months.

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!