The philosophy behind Virtual Machinerys components is that components can only be useful if -

• They are reliable
• They are cheap
• It is easy for the user to extend the components capabilities

To try to satsify these requirements Virtual Machinery follows the book publishing model. When you buy a component from us -

• You get top quality components at the same price as a good technical book
• The components are written in such a way that it is easy to substitute any component in the suite with one with the same interface but provided by a different supplier (or written by yourself)
• You get all the source code
• You get top quality documentation and useful examples
• You get a 30 day no quibble money back guarantee
• Some of our products offer support options but where there is no formal support mechanism fixes for major bugs will be posted on our website and we are happy to receive suggestions for improvement

We believe that this is the only viable model for the sale of component-based technology and that adoption of these principles will result in a free-flowing component market where there will only be two kinds of components - good or bad - and that the cost to the customer of finding those that suit them best will be minimal.

Our History

Virtual Machinery was founded by Ken Hall as a channel for technical components or products which assist in application development and software quality assurance. The primary focus at present is on the Java platform and the Smalltalk language. Most products come with full source code and are intended to be user-supported. Originally a graduate in Agricultural Science Ken spent three years in Agricultural research before starting a career in computing in 1983. He worked for a number of companies in Ireland using a wide variety of programming languages and environments.He has considerable experience in the areas of Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Telephony. In 1989 he began programming in Smalltalk and recognised that the time was approaching when object oriented languages would be the norm rather than the exception. Since 1996 Ken has been an independent consultant building applications for the financial services industry in both Smalltalk and Java. He has been an Associate Lecturer with the Open University since 1997 and has taught a number of courses - "M206 - Computing an object-oriented approach" (taught using the Smalltalk language); "M361 - modelling computer processes" (taught using C++); "M301 - Software Systems and their development" (taught via java); "M256 - Software development with Java". He is currently teaching "M362 - Developing concurrent distributed systems" and "M363 - Software engineering with objects" both of which are taught using the Java language. The company is based in Dublin, Ireland.