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SoftFluent Offers Flexible Code Generation
French code generation tools provider
SoftFluent aims to help .NET development shops more effectively build applications with its CodeFluent Entities software factory product. The solution enables dev shops to build out application components using a model-driven approach.
"It generates functional components from a description. So you describe functional entities that you want to work with," said Daniel Cohen-Zardi, co-founder of SoftFluent. "It really is a model that you compile, that you generate the application with. You can model things and then make them very independent from implementation."
Cohen-Zardi said CodeFluent Entities is unique in that it generates code that is easily maintained and allows developers to pick and choose the areas where they will apply custom coding to their applications. CodeFluent allows developers to create technology-agnostic descriptions, which CodeFluent then renders into executable applications.
"We don't believe we can generate 100 percent of the real application based on the model," he explained. "We believe we can generate 80 percent of the application in a very structured way. But then you would have to implement the other 20 percent by writing custom code at the right places," he explained.
Support for partial classes, present since .NET Framework 2.0, makes it possible for CodeFluent Entities to split generated code from custom code. Developers can update the CodeFluent model and regenerate the code while maintaining all the customizations in the resulting application. In addition, CodeFluent Entities makes it possible to efficiently target multiple development platforms from a single model, Cohen-Zardi said.
SoftFluent is working on a visual modeling tool, currently in beta, that will allow developers to work with visual representations of the underlying XML used to populate CodeFluent models. The visual modeler integrates into Visual Studio and could ship in the November time frame, Cohen-Zardi said.
SoftFluent will also be present at the the VS Live! Conference next week in Redmond, giving a presentation titled Model Driven Software Development in .NET with CodeFluent Entities.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.