  Braneworld cosmology has several attractive and distinctive features. For
instance the effective equation of state in braneworld models can be both
quintessence-like (w_0 \geq -1) as well as phantom-like (w_0 \leq -1). Models
with w_0 \geq -1 (w_0 \leq -1) are referred to as Brane 2 (Brane 1) and
correspond to complementary embeddings of the brane in the bulk. (The equation
of state in Brane 1 can successfully cross the `phantom divide' at w = -1.) In
this paper we compare the predictions of braneworld models to two recently
released supernova data sets: the `Gold' data (Riess et al, 2004) and the data
from the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) (Astier et al, 2005). We also
incorporate the recent discovery of the baryon acoustic peak in the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (Eisenstein et al, 2005) into our analysis. Our main results
are that braneworld models satisfy both sets of SNe data. Brane 1 (with w_0
\leq -1) shows very good agreement with data for values of the matter density
bounded {\em from below}: \Omega_m \geq 0.25 (Gold) and $\Omega_m \geq 0.2
(SNLS). On the other hand Brane 2 (with w_0 \geq -1) shows excellent agreement
with data for values of the matter density which are bounded {\em from above}:
\Omega_m \leq 0.45 (Gold) and \Omega_m \leq 0.35 (SNLS). The DGP model is
excluded at 3\sigma by SNLS and at 1\sigma by the Gold dataset. Braneworld
models with future `quiescent' singularities (at which the Hubble parameter and
the matter density remain finite but higher derivatives of the expansion factor
diverge) are excluded by both datasets.
