Single Platform for Rapid App Development

Brainwave is a Web-based rapid application development platform for
developers, which aims at solving developer issues surrounding integration. Most
of the platforms available have three-tier architecture constituting components
for building interface of the application, for developing actual logic of the
application, and for databases. Normally one goes for different vendors to carry
out work in these three different domains and finally integrates these
components to get a final product. Owing to different vendors, integration
becomes a complex task; Brainwave tries to simplify this complexity by
introducing a single platform that can take care of all the components required
in building applications. Brainwave SDK comes with a special database engine,
API widgets library and deployment server.

Components

Brainwave platform has six components for rapid application development. Let's
take a look at these components.

We'll start with the component that makes Brainwave different from others.
Poseidon, the database engine of Brainwave platform, is a schema-less neural
database built to overcome certain issues related to a conventional relational
database like normalization, relationship between primary and foreign keys, etc.
Poseidon stores data with the help of 'Meme' and 'Link,' where Meme is used to
store data and Link represents relationship of data. Meme the fundamental unit
of data in Poseidon has a 128-bit global unique identification key, name, and
associated aliases.

The next important component of Brainwave is the application server that is code
named 'Iris'. Iris is a Python-based server built on Open Source CherryPy
project (www.cherrypy.org).

Templating system of Brainwave is named 'Aphrodite,' which is an XSLT
(Extensible style sheet language transformation used to display XML documents on
browser) based tinplating system that contains many predefined templates that
can be used by developers. For security Brainwave comes with Cerberus, the
security manager. Security is based on capability and policies where capability
is unforgettable and communicable token of authority and policies are used to
give permissions (read/write/link) to users. Besides these four components, the
rest two components in Brainwave architecture include Hermes, a protocol that
provides Web services to applications not built on Brainwave platform and Gaea,
kernel that provides mechanism to plug-and-play from different vendors.

Implementation

To start working with Brainwave, download Brainwave SDK from
www.brainwavelive.com. Besides SDK we also installed Python 2.5 for our sample
implementation. One also needs Firefox 1.5 or later version. After installing
these components, click on 'Start brainwave' and log in using username 'root'
and password as 'password'. To create an application, click on 'Application
Builder' icon in middle and then on 'Application Generator' icon on left; this
will direct you to the page where one can enter the name of the application
along with type (sample/crude/basic). We create a basic application by the name
'PCQuest.' Now click on 'Submit.' This will show a tree view of your
application. To add code to your application move to the 'pcquest.py' file
situated at 'c:\Program Files\Brainwave \apps \pcquest\'. Open this file in a
text editor (we used Notepad++) and add the following code:

import iris, aphrodite, hermes

from idea import Idea

class pcquest(iris.App):

def __init__(self):

iris.App.__init__(self)

self.aphrodite = aphrodite.Aphrodite('pcquest')

@iris.expose

def index(self, *args, **kwargs):

return "This is first demo for PCQuest"

Now that we have created an application, let's move to the next step of
deploying it. Brainwave comes with inbuilt facility of deploying applications.
To deploy applications, click on the 'Application Deployer' icon on left. This
will generate a list of applications both loaded and unloaded. Just click on
application to be loaded and you are done. To check the output of your
application browse to:

http://localhost:8080/pcquest/

In the above code we mixed design and logic. Brainwave platform comes with
various template plugins like Cheetah, Mako, etc. These can be used to render
data. Following code snippet shows how we can use Cheetah template in our
application:

from plugins.CheetahPlugin import CheetahRender

def my_view(self, data):

return CheetahRender(template="my_template.tmpl", data=data, aphrodite=True

In this snippet 'my_template.tmpl' lies at the path 'c:\Program
Files\brainwave\apps\pcquest\views'.

Brainwave as a platform is an innovative idea that cuts down issues related
to integration and deployment; but it requires knowledge of Python and little
bit of brainstorming by developers.