CoFFEE

A teacher of English as second language from New Mexico, USA referred to CoFFEE on her blog:
http://nmckeand.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/another-product-i-wont-use/

"I was all excited this morning reading Jane’s post about CoFFEE. It sounded like a great tool. According to the CoFFEE website,

>CoFFEE - the new groupware application for digital discussions in a live classroom situation.
>CoFFEE offers customisable tools, such as a threaded discussion forum, graphical concept mapping, voting and more.
>CoFFEE is open-source and free!
>Available in: English, French, Italian and Dutch

"I was intrigued because, although I work in a langauge lab, I don’t find the software there really works for the kind of teaching I do. The computers are critical, but the actual lab software is good but not necessary.

"So I watched the demos and read all about it. I was impressed. And then I went to download it. And there is where I stopped. It only works on Macs and Windows PCs. As a Linux user at home, I couldn’t look at it to evaluate it. That means I am not going to look at it for use in my classes.

"I know I am the one losing out by not checking it out on my PC at work. But this is something I feel strongly about. If you are not considering the Linux community when developing software, then I am not interested. Especially when your product is open source!"

So, my question to the developers is: what needs to happen for there to be a Linux version of CoFFEE?

Hi Noam.

I fully understand the point of view of the teacher you are referring to. We do believe that a Linux version is needed and strongly believe that a variety of platforms is a great thing for the development and freedom of choice.

The "choice" to focus on Windows (and only marginally to Mac) was dictated only by the project CoFFEE was originally developed for (Lead). And by the kind of audience in the countries we were experimenting and testing CoFFEE in (the Lead schools used Windows). But the development was intrinsically multiplatform, being based on Java and SWT.

And to wit, we believe that a Linux version cannot be that far.. we tried during the development, found few idiosincracies and stopped trying, to be focussed on project target. But it should not take much and we are looking into somebody (open source programmer) that may want to look into it, with our full support for it.

We'll keep considering that a priority...

Regards

Vittorio Scarano

Hi everybody,
We are currently working on a linux version (for Ubuntu 8.04). We have found some problems, but anyway we hope to release the linux version with the CoFFEE 3.4 release next friday.

Regards,

Furio Belgiorno
(CoFFEE developer)