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TCS 27 Limited have carried out a wide range of development, design and
project management tasks for clients. Below are case studies showing
some of this work. To see information on some of our other clients please
visit the Clients section
of this website.
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Lloyds Register (LR) was one of Code 27's* largest clients for 10 years.
Development work was primarily on the RulesCalc project; a rule based piece of software that ran thousands of calculations to classify ships.
Underlying this software was a complex architecture that needed redeveloping and redesigning.
The objectives were:
- Increase the calculation speed
- Reduce the memory footprint
- Produce a more modular design
- Improved docking and persistence
The architecture was to run on as a standalone application on a Windows based pc.
This architecture was also to be used by other applications that may not even be related to ships.
This therefore required a generic approach to the software design.
The support teams at LR were mainly C developers so the choice of language was either C# or C++.
With discussions with Microsoft it was clear C++ was the best to improve speed.
Using C++ allowed the use of CodeJock's libraries for docking windows.
The design of the modules was split between the base data model, base GUI, and the applications.
This made extensive use of polymorphism, allowing any rules so be developed so that the Naval
architect analyst could concentrate on their specific areas of expertise.
Different rule based applications could then simply design their own specific data model
(using a supplied class library tool) and rules and use the standard GUI interfaces.
If however, users wanted to have their own GUI they could develop this and simply include
the data model and their object model and rules. It even allowed other applications including
3d tools to run rules without any GUI.
The speed of the application was dramatically improved with some areas seeing execution times
reduced by 20,000,000% (a complex solution finder which took over 18 hours to calculate was
reduced to 0.297 seconds). The memory usage was reduced by 35%.
*former company owned by Lee Marmara and Paul Thurstance (Owners of TCS 27 Limited and designers of the architecture discussed).
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In 2004, Paul Thurstance with his business partner Lee Marmara felt the non-first class cricket game
could benefit from a simple scoring application that with 'one click' could update a scorebook, scoreboard and live scores.
This lead to the development of Total Cricket Scorer (TCS) with version 1.0 being released in April 2005.
The first challenge was to be able to easily show as many windows as possible in the application at the same time.
With their extensive knowledge of Visual C++ this was achieved with the Codejock© suite of tools.
Using this approach this allowed for many views including scorecards, scorebooks (like a scorer would see if using a pen and paper) as well as an imitation scoreboard and graphics.
Scorers could also use advanced features such as plotting where the ball was bowled and where it was hit.
With all this data the next challenge was to store this locally.
Many remote cricket grounds lacked internet access so using Microsoft Access was the obvious choice.
This then allowed a full range of statistics to be shown, something all cricket players love.
The next challenge was for those scorers who had internet access to show their games live on the web.
This was achieved using a Microsoft SQL server database.
Interfaces to the server made use of Web services and C# on the server with XML being passed back and forth.
Having achieved one click scoring on TCS and the internet the final challenge was to pass this data on to scoreboards. This has been
achieved using a combination of serial communications and XML storage depending on the manufacturers wishes.
The development of TCS has been driven by cricket scorers and the TCS team who are always suggesting new ideas to improve the software.
Total Cricket Scorer v6.0 was released in March 2011 and the product is now established as the world leading cricket scoring package and
is used at Test venues such as Lord's.
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