Code Farms Inc is one of the oldest class-library companies in business. It was founded in 1988 with a mission to deliver simpler and more efficient data structures which would be also automatically persistent and, in general, we are interested in better ways to design software. With our tools, software designers are routinely 3-5x more efficient, and databases designed with our libraries run order of magnitude faster than any of the expensive, commercial OODB systems. An more

Organization

We always have been a small, private, financially independent company, and we want to remain so. It gives us more control about our destiny, while you get better service. Since the purpose of our tools is to improve software reliability, the tools themselves must be absolutely solid. We were the first company shipping full regression tests for our products; these tests are still included free of charge. If you need any help we respond immediately to emails or phone calls.

"There is no 900 number. Ask our customers - you can easily reach us, and we provide in-depth personal support. Most problems get solved within 24 hours"

We also provide consulting, usually related to the design (or redesign) of large, complex systems, or helping customers to introduce our tools. Even though this is not our prime interest, our revenue from the consulting exceeds our sales in the ratio of about 2:1

We understand that if you decide to use our software, your entire project will depend on us, and you need security that we will not go out of business, which is the usual reason why people hesitate to deal with small companies. This is the reason why we sell full source. With full source, you are not only safe, but you can also customize the software to fit your particular application.

Over 500 companies already use our tools world-wide, many of them betting their entire development on us. Some of them like our software so much that they don't want their names to be released - they don't want their competition to have the same advantage.

History

In 1989, when C++ was relatively new and had neither multiple inheritance nor templates, our C-library called Organized C (orgC) was the most extensive data structure library on the market. It already had intrusive data structures with collections, hash tables, graphs, trees, many-to-many relations, labelled properties, and disk paging - all with a fully automatic persistency.

The library was successfully used on many large, industrial projects, and proved equally useful for rapid development of fast memory-resident databases or when designing any software with complex datastructers. Typical exemples of such projects are VLCI CAD databases, programs for processing of stock-exchange data, or compiler design. Later, under the name of Data Object Library (DOL) the library was converted to C++, and numerous features were added, including "memory blasting" - a method of storing data to disk which is still an order of magnitude faster than the commonly used serialization.

DOL uses a code generator and, in mid 1990's, C++ purists considered this unacceptable. In order to prove that the same approach (intrusive data structures, data structures as objects) can be implemented in 'pure' C++ (without any code generator), we designed the Pattern Template Library (PTL) based on C++ templates. This library has two unique features: (a) It allows to treat structural design patterns (e.g. Composite) as data structures and, (b) it includes a fast, dynamically reconfigurable Finite State Machine, a class not available from any other library.

The next addition to our tool suite was the Persistent Pointer Factory (PPF), a simple, lightweight persistence that can be added to any program. It provides a smart pointer class, PersistPtr<T>. If you replace, in your existing code, all pointers to T by this smart pointer, your data automatically becomes persistent. Compared to DOL, where the primary data storage is in virtual memory, the PPF's primary storage is on disk. Data is paged to disk only when needed as in the tranactional model. PPF ideally suits to problems such as warehouse monitoring, and hotel or airline reservation.

Our INCODE Modelling which was introduced in 2004 is a result of years of research aimed at new, more efficient ways of designing software. It is a form of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in which the central model drives the architecture from within the code. This central model, just like a database schema, controls all data structures, their implementation as associations and, fully automatically, if produces theUML class diagram. This completely solves the problem of possible mismatch between the code and the diagram. All this works in both C++ and Java and can be downloaded as Open Source through SourceForge.

Future

We are aggresively pursuing new methodologies of designing software. Jiri's new book "Next Software Revolution" is being prepared for release. Our tools have been successful in browser and compiler designs, and we are considering their adaptation for Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Key Personel

Dr. Jiri Soukup is the Founder and President, and was one of the key contributors of several state-of-the-art CAD projects: director and a founding member of Cadence Design Systems, manager of AT&T's VLSI layout system, and one of the key developers of a printed board layout system for many years sold by IBM. Jiri is the prime author of all our products.

Mike Heffernan is a software architect, programmer, marketer and experienced manager. He focuses on training software development leaders, and has spoken at conferences throughout Canada, the U.S. and internationally. Formerly Director of Applied Technology Leadership at Nortel, he is now the President of OpusEdge, a seminar and coaching firm in Ottawa.