The term “metadata” gained a lot of public attention from 2013 to 2015. It started when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information with details of the national phone call metadata collection program started after the 9/11 attacks. The US government required the big telecoms to hand over things such as phone numbers and duration of calls, but not the content of them — on virtually all calls made by their customers. The leaks and the ensuing outrage from the public made metadata a topic of interest.
In the software industry, serious enterprise software applications have relied on technical metadata for several decades to provide consistency of definitions, clarity of data relationships, origin, granularity, format, location, process information and other critical attributes.
appRules make extensive use of metadata. In fact, the content of the project database is mostly metadata. Whether it is for composing your project, check-in/check-out, ETL, data replication, defining decision tables, rule set and other processes, appRules employs metadata to do job.
Metadata-driven development
A major feature of appRules Studio is that development can continue even when the user is not connected to the data sources and other artifacts required for the project. This is because the system utilizes entity/data item definitions, picklists, and deployment options directly from the metadata manager.
Metadata-driven deployment
appRules Express Server and appRules Enterprise Server utilize metadata in deployed projects. At deployment, the system utilizes metadata to create the required packages.
You can download appRules at: http://www.appstrategy.com/appRulesTrial
The package includes samples for creating, recreating and viewing metadata.