recodex-wiki/Conclusion.md

# Conclusion

The project of ReCodEx was a great experience with developing a bigger
application in team of people. We mostly enjoyed the time spent on the project,
however the deadline was too tight to implement all nice features we thought of.
Our implementation meets our predefined goals and is ready to be deployed
instead of current tool CodEx.

We made several design choices during planning and implementing the project.
From perspective of today we are mostly happy about them and we believe we have
done the best we could. One of the biggest questions was the broker/worker
programming language. The winner was C++, which is really great language
especially in revisions starting at C++11. But we are not sure if Python would
not have been better option. From the list of good choices we would like to
mention early unit testing with continuous integration, using ZeroMQ messaging
framework and the design with splitting logic into multiple components.

To sum up, we created an extensible base environment for years of further
development by numerous student projects. The faculty would benefit from higher
hardware utilization, less administration effort and a possibility to offer
ReCodEx as SaaS to partner grammar schools. Students would also appreciate
state-of-art development tools.

During the development we were using whole bunch of development tools. We would
like to thank authors, maintainers and contributors of these tools to help us
complete this project. Most notably we would like to mention explicitly the top
projects: Git and GitHub, Visual Studio Code, IDEs from JetBrains, ZeroMQ
framework, C++ spdlog library, Travis and AppVeyor CI, Nette framework and many
many others. Thank you.

Finally, we would like to thank our supervisor, Martin Kruliš, for his support
and great effort correcting text of this documentation.

## Further Improvements

A lot of work has been done, but it opened a whole bunch of new possibilities
for subsequent student projects and other kinds of contribution. We would be
happy to see people contributing to this project to make it even more awesome.
We are presenting a brief list of features we think might be worth of
completing. Surely, the list is not complete and may change in time.

- Finish web frontend. In time of the project submission it does not contain all
  features for the best user experience in all roles. This task is suitable for
  people with basic web programming experience, React and Redux knowledge is an
  advantage.
- Create web editor of job configuration. ReCodEx job evaluation follows quite
  complex task flow. To create valid configuration, author of exercise has to
  write a pretty long YAML file by hand. This of course can be partially or
  fully automated but was not implemented at time. This task therefore consist
  of creating web based editor of this configuration with prepared task
  templates allowing user to change their properties and connect them. After
  submit, YAML job configuration should be properly created.
- Write alternative commandline frontend. A lot of users want to submit their
  solutions directly from command line. That is newly possible in ReCodEx
  because of REST API, but no suitable frontend exists yet. There is unfinished
  attempt to create one in NodeJS, accessible in ReCodEx organization on
  [GitHub](https://github.com/ReCodEx/cli). The goal is to finish this project
  or create alternative tool. We would like to see one written in Python.
- Create mobile frontend. It would be really nice to have mobile application
  when you can read exercise assignments and examine your progress and
  statistics. All is possible due to ReCodEx REST API. The basic Android
  application is in development by ReCodEx team as project for programming
  mobile devices class. The code will be published as part of ReCodEx GitHub
  organization.
- Design and implement backend monitoring. For administrator would be great to
  examine status of backend (broker, workers, monitor, fileserver) directly in
  browser. Key information are which machines are online, offline or failed,
  which worker is now running a job (maybe with current progress) and view
  configuration of worker. Also some statistics with graphs should be made, for
  example workload of workers. More advanced feature is the ability to restart
  workers on the change of their configurations.
- Finish .NET sandbox for Windows. We developed initial sandbox for Windows
  environment, [WrapSharp](https://github.com/ReCodEx/wrapsharp). WrapSharp is
  only for .NET platform assemblies and most notably for C# programs and cannot
  be used generally for sandboxing on Windows. The goal is to finish
  implementation and do a really detailed security audit of the project. Also,
  integration to the worker is not fully done yet.
- SIS integration. A very nice feature is (semi)automatic creation of groups and
  assigning students to them depending on their timetable in student information
  system (SIS). However there is no standardized API for such communication yet,
  but we hope this will be possible in the future. Implementing this feature
  means extending ReCodEx API by a SIS module in PHP.


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