Editorial

Things are moving at RainCode. The tech-savvy company you surely know by now has grown, as things have evolved positively. A commercial structure has been set up to tackle this expansion, and RainCode is now pleased to welcome Deborah Torrekens, to take care of this part of the business. All this means, you will probably hear more about us than before.

Growth has also launched RainCode on a more international scene. It has especially increased its presence in the US and in Canada.

The development technical parts have not been sleeping on their laurels either. The existing versions of the RainCode Roadmap have all been restructured and standardized. They now exist for COBOL, PL/1, Informix 4GL and Ada.

Web site

As a start, let's mention that our website has been completely re-designed to allow a very simple and pleasant navigation. Further arrangements are still planned, as we are willing to add some more information about our technologies and products very shortly.

To visit our brand new site, you can still go to http://www.raincode.com, but don't forget to drop by on a regular basis to look for updates.

RainCode Roadmap

What is a RainCode Roadmap?

The RainCode Roadmap is a tool that generates all the technical documentation necessary to understand and manage a portfolio of source code. It is based on the RainCode technology: it is made of plain RainCode scripts that can be extended to suit specific needs, including additional cross-references or metrics.

The resulting documentation is produced as a set of HTML pages, that can be viewed on about any platform, provided there is a compliant web browser available. Navigation through the generated documentation can be done thanks to a number of hyperlinks and buttons.

The Roadmap can deal with unlimited amounts of source code. Moreover, all results and metrics are cross-referenced through the entire set of analysed files. Imagine you have to change a table. What programs are impacted, and where? Roadmap finds it out for you.

Another functionality of the RainCode Roadmap is the calculation of a number of metrics and critical values. Among these, you will find:

• cyclomatic complexity
• Maximum nesting level
• Number of tables
• Number of lines
• Number of code lines
• Number of comment lines

New developments

In the development of the RainCode Roadmap, we came up with an original and quite interesting new metric: the detection and counting of comment lines that are no true comments, that don't contribute to make your code more understandable, but which are merely commented pieces of code.

It is indeed interesting to know to what extend your code is documented. You can typically measure this by counting the number of comment lines in your code. RainCode Roadmap delivers a number of comment-related metrics.

But isn't it frustrating to realise thereafter that, what you assumed were good and helpful comments, were just plain old code put into comments instead of being deleted right away?

Sure it is. It makes the entire comment-related metric effort somehow worthless. That's why we worked on this issues, and came up with a solution that would drastically reduce the previous described bias. The solution we integrated in the various versions of RainCode Roadmap is intrinsically imperfect, but it works! Proof is that we get about 99.5 % accuracy on realistic tests with Ada code.

That's all folks !!!

Next time we'll talk about Ride, a RainCode based development environment that allows you to write and execute your RainCode scripts in a user-friendly interface.