TopBraid Suite 3.0 is here!

Roughly nine months after our previous official TopBraid Composer release, we have today released TopBraid Suite 3.0! This is not just another Composer version, but a significant milestone for TopQuadrant's product offerings. For the first time, we have integrated and aligned the releases of Composer with an all-new TopBraid Live and TopBraid Ensemble.

Ensemble has been redesigned completely and makes the development of Semantic Web applications easier than ever - completely without programming in the traditional sense. The best way to experience these new capabilities is to start TBC Maestro and then open a web browser at http://localhost:8083/tbl. This will open up the TopBraid Live welcome screen from which you can open an Ensemble application on whatever ontology you have in your Composer workspace, such as the following:

By default, Ensemble is a generic linked data browser and editor with features such as trees, graphs, tables, charts, search and maps. There are two main innovations of Ensemble that make it different from similar frameworks though:

• Customizing an application is easy: for example, if you want to change the kind of hierarchy to display in the tree, just configure it in TBE and save your application so that others can use it too. We have a purely model-driven architecture that represents the state of each application in RDF.
• Adding new functionality is easy: you can define SPARQLMotion scripts on the server and make them accessible via buttons in TBE. For example, you can define new operations that manipulate the currently selected tree node in whatever way you like, or you can import new data from RSS feeds or whatever else SPARQLMotion allows you to do. And if that's not enough, you can of course extend SPARQLMotion on the server.

There are several other major innovations in TopBraid 3.0, including SPIN which I have written about in many previous blog entries. We hope you enjoy the new TopBraid!