CourseSmart is a course delivery package produced in the Fall 2004 session of CS-205 (Software Engineering) at the University of Vermont. The package is (C) Copyright 2004 by the following authors:

Peter C. Chapin
Shaun Chu
Ahmed Foco
David Guay
Germain Njila Mopa
David Van Horn

We are distributing this package under the terms of the GNU Public License and the GNU Free Documenation Licence, as appropriate.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version
2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program;
if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA
02111-1307 USA

The GPL is intended to cover all the Java source code in the client directory (and its subdirectories) and all the C++ source code in the server directory (and its subdirectories). See the file GPL.txt in one of those directories for the details of the license.

The GFDL is intended to cover all the documentation in the doc directory (and its subdirectories), the www directory (and its subdirectories), the http directory (and its subdirectories), and the server/repository directory (and its subdirectories). See the file GFDL.txt in one of those directories for the details of the license.

This distribution contains some third party libraries that are NOT necessarily covered by the GPL and the statements made here are not intended to cover those libraries. Those libraries are contained in JAR files in the client directory; all JAR files in that directory are from third parties, however no other part of this distribution is third party code.

The following directories are part of the source distribution.

• client: Source code for the Java client.

• doc: Design documentation in Microsoft Word format.

• httpd: Sample configuration file for the CERN httpd web server (used to serve course content).

• server: Source code for the C++ server (written to POSIX API).

  • repository: Test repository with sample course content (including user level documentation... currently very sketchy).

  • test: Test Perl client used to send CourseSmart protocol messages to the server. Also text fixture for unit tests of server components.

The client and server are built separately.

To build the client, load the client project into IntelliJ and build it using the IntelliJ menus. CourseSmart is known to compile with Java 1.7. The libraries needed to build the client are included in this source distribution.

To build the server, go into the server directory and type 'make'. You will need a reasonably recent version of g++ in your path. CourseSmart is known to compile with the 3.3.3 version of g++. You will also need a copy of the Xerces XML parser library installed. This library is not provided as part of the distribution. CourseSmart is known to work with v2.5 of Xerces.

To run the server execute 'main' in the server directory. By default it will listen on port 8080 and use the directory './repository' for its repository. This distribution comes with a sample repository below the server's home directory so executing 'main' in the server's home directory will cause it to use this sample repository by default. You can use the -p and -r command line options on the server to override the defaults. For example:

main -p 9000 -r /path/to/repository

Currently the repository needs to exist with certain control files and directories already established before the server will function properly. If you are interested in setting up a new repository you should copy the sample repository in this distribution to a new location and edit the various files as you desire. In a future release, the server may automatically create all the necessary files so that the repository directory could be initially empty.

The CourseSmart server depends on a conventional web server for distributing course content (the URL to each unit's index page is stored in the file 'unit_index.url' in the unit's directory). The location of that server, and of the corresponding content, is entirely independent of the location of the CourseSmart server. However, if the instructor intends to use CourseSmart for managing unit content via the CourseSmart client, a web server needs to run on the same machine as the CourseSmart server. We recommend the CERN httpd server for this purpose since it is quite lightweight and relatively easy to configure. A sample configuration file is provided in this distribution.

The CourseSmart server also depends on Mhonarc (http://www.mhonarc.org/) for converting the textual discussion board messages into HTML format. It is these HTML messages that are served to the client via HTTP.

If you wish to run the server on Windows you will need the Cygwin system. You will also need to install the cygserver module so that System V semaphores are supported. See the Cygwin documentation for more information on doing this.

To run the client, go to the client's home directory and type 'make run'. This executes the client with an appropriate classpath so that the libraries it needs will be accessible.

There is some design documentation on the CourseSmart system and on the protocol used between the client and server in the 'doc' directory in this distribution.

It is the intention to eventually prepare user level documentation as a collection of course units in the sample repository in this distribution. That documentation does not yet exist.

A number of features described in the design documentation are not yet implemented (feel free to fix this!). In particular

• The assignment feature is implemented in a different way than described in the design documents. Students are allowed to upload and manipulate their submissions on a per-unit basis. However, there is no special support for unit assignments in the course materials. While the rationale given in the design documents for special support is reasonable, it was felt that the instructor could simply provide the assignment for a unit using an HTML page linked to the other pages for a unit. In this respect the abiility to post and submit assignments is supported.

• The facility for on-line quizzes is entirely unimplemented.

• The facility for an automatic glossary of terms present in the course materials is entirely unimplemented.

• There is no facility that allows the instructor to add assignments or manage the user database from the client. The instructor needs to edit the server's control files directly. While this is clearly not 100% desirable, it was felt to be relatively acceptable. CourseSmart is designed for small scale, "personal" use. An instructor who is running the server on his/her office machine, for example, should have little trouble accessing and editing the necessary files.

• Too much user state information is currently maintained on the client. The original concept was that the server would store all per-user state (such as information about the last unit accessed). The client would then restore that state from the server when a user logs in. This facility is currently unimplemented.