No Open Blockers

I made a lot of changes to the code base to support the last few projects of the semester. I figured now that school is out for the summer it’d be a good idea to post a build with what CodeTurtle ended up being after a semester of usage (seven projects in total).

Before I go on, I want to welcome Scott and Emily to the project. Scott was a contributor on this release, fixing some critical issues when running on Windows and providing the very cool printing support (a feature that coincided with me running out of paper at home and thus failing to print out the last project of the semester anyway). Emily is just starting out and we’re deciding on where she is going to focus her efforts. I’m psyched to be able to work with them and appreciate the support.

A big improvement with this release is that I finally had the discipline to sit down and begin to write some documentation. I ripped out the hardcoded HTML file from CodeTurtle and began work on a wiki specifically for the project:

http://codeturtle.noopenblockers.com

It’s a work in progress. What a loaded statement, it’s always going to be a work in progress. That’s one of the appeals of using a wiki, you get to use the excuse that “I’ll add that to the wiki soon” since all of the information is stored online.

The wiki has a mixed audience. I’m trying to jump to the quick parts of how to download and run since that’s what most people will be interested in. But I’m also catering to my students who want to contribute (as well as some, um, academics that haven’t actually worked on a real software project and sadly don’t know how to use these things). So I took some extra steps to explain concepts such as source control systems and build systems. This will pay off anyway, since I do a lecture on these things in class but never had a central reference location I could point them to. It’s also got my first feeble attempts at a logo (I’m thinking of blogging on its creation process in the future). My lack of creative skills is astounding.

Along the same lines, since there has been a growing interest lately, I took a number of steps taken to help introduce new users. I flushed out the sample project a bit more to make for a better demo. On the first run, there is a guided setup that will help the user set up the compiler used in the grading process and automatically configuring the sample project. I don’t know why, but I find writing that sort of thing to be a lot of fun.

As usual, the latest release can be found at the SourceForge site: https://sourceforge.net/projects/codeturtle/.

I’m actually including the release notes in this post since there was some pretty cool shit done since 0.3.

New and Cool Stuff

• Added current project printing support (courtesy of Scott).
• Added progress bar to indicate the work done towards creating a gradebook (compiling submissions, grading, etc.).
• Added toolbar to UI to support quick access to common functions.
• Added user preferences support.
• Changed handling of command line options. If any of the gradebook options are specified, the create gradebook dialog will automatically be displayed and prepopulated with the command line values.
  • The “-c” option has been renamed to “-g” to reflect the change in terminology from “project checker” to “project grader”.
  • The “-c” option now clears the Java preferences node for CodeTurtle.
  • The command line options can be displayed by passing the “-?” flag.
  • The “–sample” option will populate the gradebook creation dialog with the included sample project
• Better flushed out sample project, including cleaning up their representation in the source control system and adding build scripts to set up their state.
• Added “first run” feature that will perform installation and sample steps to ease new users into configuration and using CodeTurtle.
• Bug fixes (hopefully more fixed than new ones introduced).