recodex-wiki/Conclusion.md

Conclusion

The project of ReCodEx was a great experience to develop 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 today's perspective 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 C++11. But we are not sure if Python would not have been better option. From the best choices we would like to mention early unit testing with continuous integration, using ZeroMQ messaging framework and our 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 possibility to offer ReCodEx as SaaS to partner grammar schools. Students also appreciate present development tools.

During 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.

Further improvements

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

• Finish web frontend. In time of project submission it does not contain all features for 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 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 organisation on GitHub. 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 make, 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. WrapSharp is only for .NET platform assemblies and most notably for C# programs and cannot be used generraly 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. 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.