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From: Stephen Edwards (edwards_at_cs.vt.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 07 2004 - 09:42:26 EST 

Message-ID: <41B5C152.8070103@cs.vt.edu>
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 09:42:26 -0500
From: Stephen Edwards <edwards_at_cs.vt.edu>
Subject: Re: Information for those interested in Web-CAT


Sorry for the delay in replying--the end of semester crunch has been keeping me away from e-mail more than I'd like.

> We've made some significant progress on our curriculum overhaul here at
 > Franklin,

Excellent. Have you started putting up any materials or descriptive documents? I'd love to hear more about what you are doing.

> As such, I'm inquiring again about the status of Web-CAT.

We've been running our most intensive semester yet, and our first semester supporting g++ as well as Java. We've also been lucky enough to have a technical writing class take on the task of writing an instructor's guide, and having a few students from a usability engineering class perform a usability inspection of the redesigned web GUI we hope to use next semester.

I am hoping we can make a major installation revision and transition over the break, and roll out our first major revision for the start of classes in mid-January.

> Previously, you were willing to host courses on your system

I still am. In fact, we have a remote class this semester, and that has worked out well.

> but I think we'd like to try to host it ourselves here at Franklin.

I fully understand. At present, we still have all the same installation issues--no installation guide, and a big list of separate open-source tools that must be installed and configured in addition to WebObjects. We are hoping to change over to a servlet-based application rather than a stand-alone one, and thus change over to that style of installation process. This will allow us to package some of the necessary dependencies into one bundle using a standard installation process. That should substantially ease things.

To be practical, we should have things arranged so that you could install and run your own copy (and we could have a single sourceforge-style shared CVS repository) at some point during the next 6 months or so. Heck that might even be true by Jan 15, but I wouldn't advise putting a local installation on the critical path for anything required for courses next semester. We'd certainly be in a position to host courses from institutions next semester, however, so that you could use that semester to (help me) work out any installation instructions/issues/difficulties on a non-critical local installation of your own. If you have a longer time horizon in mind, that is workable, too.

> 1. Are you willing to release Web-CAT under some kind of open source license?

Yes. We already have a creative commons license on the source code. I'm more than happy to make it available, but haven't put it up openly for security reasons. I am hoping we can remove the "sensitive" configuration data from the code base during this major revision after classes wind down here so that we can make the source public.

> 2. I know that WebObjects is a requirement for development,
 > but is it required for deployment?

Yes. The latest educational price is still $99, however, which isn't a huge investment. At this time, we don't have the manpower to switch over to a similar non-commercial framework. Note that you can use open-source tools like Eclipse and WOLips to do all the dev work without relying on Apple's WebObjects development tools. Frankly, that is the way I prefer to develop. However, you still need a licensed copy of the run-time libraries to compile against, as well as to deploy.

> 3. Any mailing list set up yet for Web-CAT users?

No, just the Wiki at the moment.

-- 

Stephen Edwards            604 McBryde Hall          Dept. of Computer Science
e-mail      : edwards_at_cs.vt.edu           U.S. mail: Virginia Tech (VPI&SU)
office phone: (540)-231-5723                         Blacksburg, VA  24061
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