A serious piece of data handling classes, for the time when it was written (by Trish and Peter), because it beat local and remote views and could seamlessly switch between various servers - it could handle dbfs, and pretty much anything with an ODBC driver, and switching just meant you'd use a different connection class and keep everything else as it was.
Except they had to keep everything in a few metadata tables, where definitions of everything were stored. And not trusting their users with syntax and other finer points - what do they know, they're just fox programmers - they made it rather impossible to use except through a couple of forms where you entered the parameters, and those forms would build the records for you. And that's where trouble began - the forms were anything but intuitive, the organization was confusing, and half of the time you didn't quite know what you were doing. Worse, on the eHosp project I came into a situation where they already had everything set up, so I didn't have that trial and error time, and had to learn web programming at the same time, so I ended up learning the latter quite well, while barely touching the Brakin classes.
Six years later, when George was invited to part time on the Feds web app, we simply went for the same old, which meant Rick Strahl's WWWC and Brakin classes. And, mind you, it was just bad. It worked, but now I had six more years of experience in dealing with SQL, even wrote my own SPT classes (sequel pass-through, aka updatable cursors) which did all of that and did it much simpler, actually did a lot more (Brakin doesn't handle joins and a few more cases which you then had to code manually, thus running two sets of code in parallel). We ended up with Jan writing exactly such classes, using cursoradapter as base class, from scratch, to which George said he was crazy and... it worked swimmingly.
Comparing the 2003 and 2010 versions of Brakin classes (not the forms, I wouldn't open them again, no way), I see there's a lot of different error handling, but most of the code is still there, same as it ever was.