The BOSS Online Submission System / News: Recent posts

BOSS has been updated to render it compatible with modern JVMs and development environments.

The BOSS Online Submission system, used for structuring assignments, collecting and marking submissions has reached version 3.2.1. This is a bugfix on the previous release:

A few links in the web client were broken; these have been fixed, a few issues relating to the forward/rollback buttons in the Java GUI staff client have been fixed, and some code has gone in moving towards database independence (plus this may fix some wierd bugs relating to removing markers on databases other than MySQL).... read more

The BOSS Online Submission System for collection and marking of assignments has reached version 3.2. This summer's final release has been mainly concerned with tidying up and bug fixing. Major changes are mostly behind the scenes including:

The web clients now use server-side XSLT to generate pages.
The generated HTML is much cleaner and makes use of style sheets and div tags to do the layout rather than the messy nested tables previously used.
We have written a lot of unit tests for the server components and will hopefully head towards complete coverage in the next development cycle.
The installation procedure is now more intuitive and configures the settings for you.
Many bug fixes, our Bugzilla only contains enhancements at the moment, so send us some bugs before we get bored!

After receiving word of problems with the Java GUI for version 3.1, we have patched a file to correct some problems. It affects a few *nix windows managers that didn't support some of the features we were using. This caused the windows to be too small to use.

The CVS tree has been updated with the work we have done so far this summer, if you are interested. Work has so far focused on implementing unit tests for the servers, converting the web client to using XSLT and bug fixes.

The new version of BOSS has an improved installation process and bug fixes to various things including:

• Binary file submission through the student clients no longer corrupts files!
• Up to date database schema for coresoft light, it now matches with what the code expects.

The BOSS Online Submission System is course-management software designed to help with the management, marking and submission of student assessments. Version 3.0 includes a web client, redesigned user interfaces for the Java clients and a graphical installer as well as improved plagiarism detection.

A team of undergraduates have been working hard all summer on improving and updating BOSS, which has resulted in many new features. As a result of third year project work at the university we have a new web client, brand new user interfaces for the java application clients and natural language plagiarism detection to compliment the pre-existing source code plagiarism detection.... read more

Hi,

CVS is now consistent with our local CVS here at Warwick so you have everything there that we have. Also updated the binary release as someone forgot to include the server jars :)

Dan.

The first proper release of BOSS this year has just been posted. There are full details of the changes in the notes for the file release but there's plenty of new stuff to look forward to including a graphical installer with the binary release, which should make things a bit easier.

We're all still working on BOSS for the rest of September, which is when term starts at Warwick and we all have to start going to lectures again. Before the end of the summer we should have some documentation for all the new stuff, any help files you find in the source or binary releases stand a good chance of being quite out of date because of all the changes we've made this summer. Also, we're still coding as well so if you find any bugs let us know and we can have a go at fixing them before term starts.

We are releasing a copy of the current CVS tree at the University of Warwick as for the last few weeks intensive development work has taken place to upgrade BOSS. New features include:

-> A web client for using BOSS from a website rather than the previous java application client.
-> A new updated GUI for the application clients.
-> JUnit testing of student submissions
-> Sherlock plagiarism detector now included with capabilities to detect plagiarism on natural language submissions as well as source-code submissions.
-> Simple database caching to speed access to the coresoft database
-> Various bug fixes... read more

BOSS version 2.3 has been released onto SourceForge.net. The BOSS Online Submission System is a course management tool, developed by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick. BOSS allows students to submit assignments online securely.

Please see the changelog for a list of improvements in this version.

BOSS 2.2, the latest version of the University of Warwick's online submission system has been released.

Welcome to the BOSS Online Submission Systems project page.
The first beta version of BOSS will be available within the next few days