Overview

Defining applications in business terms

With Brane™ Platform you can produce advanced enterprise applications from business-level models. Starting fresh or from existing UML models, XML schemas or other source materials, business analysts and applications developers work together on business-level descriptions free of technological details. Brane™ models are easy-to-use and come with wizards and other helpers to make them accessible to business analysts.

Powerful features

Brane™ is the first complete platform for model driven architecture (MDA) automating the entire application development process.

Brane™ unifies data, rules, and user interface constructs to provide working applications based on best-practice use of Java™ EE technologies from industry standard commercial and open source suppliers. Brane™ focuses on enterprise data management applications with complex business rules and user interfaces.

Brane™ designs the database, implements the business logic and provides easy-to-use browser and rich client interfaces for end-users.

Brane's MDA platform

This is an enterprise platform for business-compliant, standards-based applications that customers can develop and evolve themselves, that integrate seamlessly, and that survive business and technology changes.

Brane blends SOA, SCA, OSGi with MDA

There are several definitions describing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but the main thread through all of these definitions are reuse, granularity, modularity, and interoperability. A service-oriented architecture is, in essence, a collection of services that communicate with each other. These services are self-contained and do not depend on the context or state of other services, and they work within a distributed systems architecture.

Since SOA is all about reuse and decoupling of technologies to ease interoperability a new set of specifications have been defined describing a model for building applications and systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture. These specifications are labeled Service Component Architecture (SCA) and extends and complements prior approaches to implementing services. Important to note is that SCA builds on open standards, such as Web services.

OSGi is all about change! OSGi is a very dynamic modular system that provides a service-oriented, component-based environment for Java™. The functionality provided by OSGi makes Java the premier environment for software integration, and allows applications to be constructed from reusable and collaborative components which can be composed into an application and deployed.

A notable fact about recent development regarding the OSGi and the OSGi Alliance is that the technology is rapidly increasing the number of major Java and SOA players supporting the technology, such as these new members and already signed up Java and SOA players.

Brane supplies self-contained Service implementations to SOA on top of a robust, and extensible runtime. This runtime is inherently service oriented and built on top of OSGi. In addition, Brane provides a design-time environment that provides an abstraction from underlying technologies and captures dependencies and composition.

SCA Design Time	SCA Runtime	Brane
SCA Domain	OSGi Bundle	Application, Bundle
Composite	Plugin	Model
Component or Composite	Java, WSDL	Facade
Policy, Property	Extensions, Extension Points	Configuration
Composite	Java, BPEL	Process

Extensibility

Brane™ automates routine development tasks, so that developers spend their time on high-value tasks, resulting in better applications in less time at lower cost and reduced risk.

Brane™ is built on Eclipse's Rich Client Platform and orchestrates advanced Eclipse components along with other industry-standard commercial and open source components. When necessary, developers can extend Brane™ applications and the Brane™ Platform itself to meet special requirements using standard Eclipse techniques.