| dc.description.abstract | Learning how to develop software is by itself not an easy task; Even more so if there is a steep learning curve at the initial stages just to configure the development environment. For the students at NTNU in the course TDT4100, the exercises they need to work on requires many steps to set up the development environment before they can begin working on the code.
In this research, a previously created web editor was used and developed further to fit the new requirements. The web editor itself, due to the requirements, had to support many features that would have existed in the students' local development environment, such as working on multiple files, syntax highlighting, error/warning checking, content assists, running code and performing tests.
As well as having these features, the web editor had to be available for the students for each exercise they have to work on. This meant that the web editor must support being initiated from the location of any exercise, with the content that was required for that exercise. The instructor of the course must be able to decide where the web editor should be, and what content is required for the exercise.
The result from this research is two artifacts; Confluedit and Eclipsky. Confluedit has the responsibility of initiating the web editor by giving it the exercise description, while Eclipsky handles the projects and serves the web editor.
To verify the quality of Eclipsky, performance measuring and usability testing was performed. The performance of the implementation was within the requirements, with the highest average delay just above half a second from starting a new exercise. When measuring the basic use of the web editor, operations like updating the resources, content assists and error/warning checks had a delay below 25ms. Although there were some usability issues that needs to be looked into, the overall quality was satisfactory. | |
