Codedness LLC was founded in 2026 when Hans Peter Willems, the main founder and CEO/CTO of the company, decided to bring the Codedness IDE to the market as a commercial SaaS product. Up until then, Codedness was used for over a decade as a secret weapon in many projects, both for projects inside Hans Peter's other companies and outside for numerous client projects.

During these years of extensive use of the platform, it was exclusively used as an internal tool for building client projects. No external developers had access, and the possibilities of the Codedness platform were basically a guarded secret used to have a competitive edge in the market. With the founding of Codedness LLC and the release of Codedness IDE as a commercial platform, clients can now use the platform themselves to rapidly build tailored software.

The official Codedness LLC headquarters are located in Richmond, Virginia, USA. The current development team is located in the Netherlands.

Near the end of 2008, Hans Peter Willems decided to do what he had been thinking about for several years: build a functional code generator that, unlike most code generators of that time, would not just generate skeleton code for a project but instead generate fully functional applications. The idea was to be able to generate an application that you could basically log in to as a user and start using immediately after generation.

Reality differed, but not much. After generation, there was an (also generated) database schema file that needed to be loaded into the DBMS, but that was it. As soon as the database was up and running, the application was ready to use.

This first version was completely built with Java tooling. An external (open source) data modeler called Druid was used to build the data model and exported an XML file. This file was then read by the code generator, which was implemented inside the Java NetBeans IDE with the use of Ant-XLR and FreeMarker, a Java-based template engine.

The generated code was PHP, using the CakePHP framework as a foundation, as PHP was the most popular programming language for building web-based applications at that time. Numerous applications were built with this code generator, including some pretty big ERP-level projects.

During the years of using the first version, several ideas mounted to build an even better version with extended functionality. The initial thought was to simply eliminate the external data modeler, as integrating that step into the actual code generator would make the template system more manageable.

The next obvious step was to make the template system more flexible. In the first code generator, the templates contained a mix of FreeMarker code to do the generation logic and lots of CakePHP code snippets that were to be generated based on that FreeMarker logic. From a code quality perspective, this was far from ideal.

Isolating the templates from the generator logic would make it possible to have multiple template sets for different programming languages.

Thinking a bit more (actually a lot more) about this, it became obvious that this new version had to be a web-based system and should be built with the “old” code generator. This idea led to the next breakthrough insight: a web-based system would be multi-user (the original code generator obviously wasn't) and would make it possible to integrate all custom coding into the system as well.

Up until then, custom code was implemented through so-called stubs, additional code files that referenced the generated functions through a complex setup of function calls. With custom coding integrated, we could now use insert points instead, a much more powerful system. So, the functionality was decided, and the first version of the Codedness IDE was developed and taken into production use.

Although CakePHP worked perfectly fine for most projects that were done with Codedness, one big project triggered the development of a Clojure-based template set.

Clojure, a LISP-style programming language, runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and brings numerous advantages over CakePHP. In 2023 we started developing the Clojure templates for use in Codedness, which was itself still developed on top of the CakePHP framework.

With the newly developed Clojure templates, several large management applications were developed, built, and taken into production. A complete facelift for the generated applications was also implemented in the new templates, based on a modern CSS framework.

With the new Clojure templates working, it was already obvious that, at some future time, the Codedness platform should also be rebuilt on top of the Clojure templates. The CakePHP templates were no longer current, and updating them seemed already beyond usefulness. Updating those templates to include a more modern GUI framework basically meant rewriting them from scratch.

With all the possibilities and potential of the Codedness platform, it was finally decided to make the platform available for client use. The current version, dubbed NG for Next Generation, is completely written in Clojure as a Codedness project and is extended with loads of new functionality for the client's use.