aimmath-developers — Development related messages

RE: [Aimmath-developers] personal branches & further devel

[Gustav W D. <gus...@vi...>]

Manolis wrote:

> Different branches for different people would be a good idea (is
> there a limit
> that sourceforge would impose on us .. how many of us could have different
> branches?)

As far as I am aware there is no limit to the number of branches. Tomorrow
(Tuesday) I will create the development branch and then anyone who needs to
can split his own branch off from that.

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] server.xml does not need to be modified

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

Following a suggestion by Manolis I tried to install AIM without moving it
into the ROOT directory and without messing with the file
/tomcat/conf/server.xml. I was surprised how easy that was. Here is the
procedure on Windows 2000, but I assume it is similar on other systems:

1) Install Tomcat (I used the latest stable release 4.1.24 and it comes with
a very posh automatic installation program)
2) check out the AIM module from SourceForge into Tomcat's webapps folder
   (by default this will create a subfolder named AIM but you can choose a
different name, for example the command
       cvs checkout -d MYAIM AIM
    will put AIM into the directory MYAIM)
3) remove the write protection from the files zonefoot.html zonehead.html
adminfoot.html adminhead.html in /MYAIM/WEB-INF/root (see
    previous message)
3) comment out the lines in Servlet.mpl that overwrite
/tomcat/conf/server.xml (To find these search for "file1 :=" in
Servlet.mpl).
4) do the usual changes to ManualConfig.mpl and add the lines
     Config['TomcatPort'] := 8080:
     Config['TomcatContext'] := "MYAIM":
     Config['WebAppDir'] := "C:\\Tomcat\\webapps\\MYAIM":
     Config['WebDir'] := "C:\\Tomcat\\webapps\\MYAIM":
     Config['HostName'] := "144.32.100.134": (this one you will have to
change of course)
4) Start Maple in the directory /MYAIM/WEB-INF/maple and read in the files
AutoConf.mpl, Servlet.mpl, and Make.mpl
     as in the standard installation procedure.
5) start Tomcat using  Start -> Programs -> Apache Tomcat 4.1 -> Start
Tomcat
6) point the browser to http://144.32.100.134:8080/MYAIM (again you will
have to put in your own address of course)

I was surprised that I did not have to tell Tomcat about AIM. Apparently
Tomcat saw that there was a nice web.xml in the directory MYAIM/WEB-INF and
that was enough.

The advantage of the above is that I now have two AIM systems running
simultaneously on my machine, one in the subfolder AIM and one in MYAIM, one
to serve the students and one for me to play around with (develop ;-) ).

Can some of you try whether this works for them as well? If this works
without problems for several of us then we should think about taking out the
server.xml stuff permanently from Servlet.mpl. Was this overwriting of
server.xml perhaps necessary only in the older versions of Tomcat? Perhaps
Neil can answer this question?

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] log files taken out of CVS

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

I have deleted the log files "lastrequest" and "servletlog" from the CVS
repository. I don't know why I included them in the first place because they
are auto-generated.

I think it would be a good idea if the AIM module was always checked out in
read-only mode. Before you start editing a file you must then issue the
command "cvs edit filename". This clears the write protection on the file
and more importantly it lets others know that you are editing the file.

The only thing to remember when checking out in read-only mode is that you
have to issue the command
  cvs edit zonefoot.html zonehead.html adminfoot.html adminhead.html
before trying to run AIM because AIM needs to be able to write to these
files.

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] personal branches & further devel

[<ma...@ma...>]

1) branches 
-----------
> If I created a branch for myself and committed to that branch, then this
> would not interfere with the stability of the main trunk.

What I do for now is get everything from the sourceforge cvs and have another
cvs installed in my linux box (I guess though that you are using Windows more
so I am not sure what would happen there) for development that I am doing so I
can get them from home as well... if/when there would be  a need for commiting
back I would commit to the souceforge and everything would be ok.

Different branches for different people would be a good idea (is there a limit
that sourceforge would impose on us .. how many of us could have different
branches?)

I am away at the moment but I could from next week write a small doc to also
describe the changes I made to have AIM under a different directory as I deploy

my own tomcat that runs other application too and having AIM under ROOT was a
really bad idea...

2) development
--------------

I have a terribly slow connection and I can't comment on other devel issues
like the  browser detection and the ttm changes which would be great and
eventually lead to spearating the graphical interface from MAPLE to JSPs or
other dynamic pages that can be changed/maintained easier

I also asked in the JISC list and didn't get any replies but in case any of you

didn't see it we are going to do some work in separating the student data from
MAPLE in a different database in MySQL so as they could be used by other
systems. Has anyone changed anything in that and would be a scope in wokring
together or including his changes ?

Manolis


----- End forwarded message -----

[Aimmath-developers] automatic e-mail notification of commits

[Gustav W D. <gus...@vi...>]

I have enabled a feature that will send an automatic e-mail to the list
aimmath-commit whenever a commit is taking place to AIM on SourceForge.
First I had it set so that the e-mails would be sent directly to this list
but I thought that might be undesirable. Now anyone can choose for
themselves whether they want to subscribe to these e-mails or not. It will
probably take a day before the list is in operation.

I believe that I have also turned on e-mail notifications that are sent to
you when files you are watching are edited by others. However I am not
actually able to set any watches myself (usually this should be possible
with the commands "cvs watch on" and "cvs watch add") but I only get the
error message "cvs [server aborted]: unknown command: watch_on". I have sent
a support request to SourceForge.

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] CVSROOT loginfo,1.2,1.3

[<gus...@us...>]

Update of /cvsroot/aimmath/CVSROOT
In directory sc8-pr-cvs1:/tmp/cvs-serv641

Modified Files:
	loginfo 
Log Message:
directs mail to aimmath-commit list upon commit

Index: loginfo
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/aimmath/CVSROOT/loginfo,v
retrieving revision 1.2
retrieving revision 1.3
diff -C2 -d -r1.2 -r1.3
*** loginfo	18 May 2003 10:53:01 -0000	1.2
--- loginfo	18 May 2003 11:36:37 -0000	1.3
***************
*** 25,27 ****
  # or
  #DEFAULT (echo ""; id; echo %{sVv}; date; cat) >> $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/commitlog
! DEFAULT /cvsroot/sitedocs/CVSROOT/cvstools/syncmail %{sVv} aim...@li...
--- 25,27 ----
  # or
  #DEFAULT (echo ""; id; echo %{sVv}; date; cat) >> $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/commitlog
! DEFAULT /cvsroot/sitedocs/CVSROOT/cvstools/syncmail %{sVv} aim...@li...

Re: [Aimmath-developers] my personal branch in the repository?

[Greg G. <gr...@ol...>]

Jon Breitenbucher wrote:
> Any idea as to when MathML will be a viable possibility?

I don't, but I just downloaded ttm and had a quick look at its
documentation. Its switches and usage are almost identical to tth.
It occurred to me that the way the Java code is written one should
be able to replace the tth binary by ttm and everything should run
as before except that MathML would be produced where HTML was produced
before. Indeed it does. However, Ian Hutchinson points out on his website
that Mozilla only renders MathML in XML. I tried it as a straight HTML
page and everything came out flat - no superscripts etc. So I copied the
page to a file with an .xml extension. Mozilla then recognised the page
as XML but didn't get far because the rules for tags are much more rigorous
than for HTML. It complained of a <br> not having a matching </br>.
I tried some quick fiddles, and eventually got the page to display.
However \sqrt{....} din't seem to be appropriately translated (the radical
sign was printed strangely and the bar over the top became a thick black
line. One would need to work out why it does this (bug in ttm? mozilla?) and
AIM would need to be revised to ensure the tags match and files would need
to be written to files with .xml instead of .html extensions. (What I noticed:
<br>, <hr> and <input> tags need to be replaced by <br/>, <hr/> and <input/>
tags. Are they all the changes needed?)

BTW Did you figure out what was going on with Mac OSX.

  Regards,
  Greg

Re: [Aimmath-developers] my personal branch in the repository?

[Jon B. <jbr...@wo...>]

Greg,

I think this is a great idea. I had the same issue as you with unicode 
output. My students were very confused and it created a minor headache. 
This is not what I wanted them to experience in the pilot.

Any idea as to when MathML will be a viable possibility?
>
>  1) Browser detection
>     . if Mozilla/Netscape 6+ detected tth should use -u switch
>     . if Internet Explorer detected no change, except that if IE 5
>       is detected it should warn the user (student) that it is buggy
>       and that multiple levels of indices are rendered wrongly
>       e^(x^2) is rendered as e^(x*2)
>     . other browsers warn that symbol font may not be rendered 
> correctly,
>       or else if we know they are unicode-capable use -u switch
>     I have something modelled on the idea Manolis suggested a few weeks
>     ago when I said there was a snag with using unicode with IE.
______________________________________
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with 
meaningless marks on paper. (David Hilbert)

Jon Breitenbucher
The College of Wooster
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Wooster, Ohio 44691

(330)263-2207
jbr...@wo...
http://jbreitenbuch.wooster.edu/~jonb

RE: [Aimmath-developers] my personal branch in the repository?

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

Greg wrote:

> I think we should have a current version branch and a
> development branch.

Sounds sensible to me. Does anyone have an objection?

> .... Anyway, we should put some
> sort of plan like this together and decide when we want to release AIM 2.2
> and what it should have in it.

I think we can only plan a date for a next release once we have seen how
much development is actually going on in practice. There certainly is a
substantial list of feature requests on SourceForge already.

> I have a few ideas for what I want in it.

And you are even close to having impemented them! Great!

Gustav

Re: [Aimmath-developers] my personal branch in the repository?

[Greg G. <gr...@ol...>]

Gustav W Delius wrote:
> 
> I have a computer at work and a computer at home and would like to do some
> AIM development work on both. CVS would be the perfect solution for this if
> I did a commit every time before switching computers. If I created a branch
> for myself and committed to that branch, then this would not interfere with
> the stability of the main trunk. Can those of you who are more familiar with
> CVS than me please tell me if they think that this is a bad idea or if there
> is an alternative solution? Otherwise I am planning to create my branch next
> Tuesday.

That's a good idea. With GAP we also have a development branch and a current
version branch. Most commits occur in the development branch, though
occasionally people will create another branch so as not to disturb things
elsewhere. The current version branch is only modified when bugs are
discovered and fixed.

I think we should have a current version branch and a development branch.
It makes sense for you to also have your own branch if you have stuff that
is not fully fleshed out and committing it would leave things in a broken
state.

What happens with GAP is that there is an attempt to `regularly' ship out
a new version. At the moment `regular' means `try for once a year'. In order
to keep to some sort of schedule, we now have an `essential' list and a
`wish' list, and a `freeze' date. A little before the freeze date we try to
determine the status of items on each list, and move anything off the wish
list for the next version that don't have any chance of fulfilment, and
determine how long it will take to deal with items on the essential list
to see if the freeze date needs to be moved. Anyway, we should put some
sort of plan like this together and decide when we want to release AIM 2.2
and what it should have in it. I have a few ideas for what I want in it.
I would like to see in it.

 1) Browser detection
    . if Mozilla/Netscape 6+ detected tth should use -u switch
    . if Internet Explorer detected no change, except that if IE 5
      is detected it should warn the user (student) that it is buggy
      and that multiple levels of indices are rendered wrongly
      e^(x^2) is rendered as e^(x*2)
    . other browsers warn that symbol font may not be rendered correctly,
      or else if we know they are unicode-capable use -u switch
    I have something modelled on the idea Manolis suggested a few weeks
    ago when I said there was a snag with using unicode with IE.
 2) Trig.mpl+
      This is a package I developed for some trig. questions. It's possibly
      a little too specialised and so I would like the other developers
      to look at it before it is included. Possibly some things can be
      pulled out and generalised.
 3) MultiRandom.mpl+
      This is a package I have developed to give feedback and randomise
      the order of the choices for MR and MC questions. It could probably
      be improved a bit further.
 4) Prob.mpl
      A small package I recently put together for a probability quiz,
      to automate checks for probabilities being between 0 and 1.
      In a week's time I'll need to make ready a normal distribution quiz,
      and no doubt will find some inadequacies of what's there currently.

... and there are a number of other minor additions and improvements.
Anyway, I'm not quite ready to commit this stuff. I need things to slacken
off a little so that I can tidy it up first.
      
  Regards,
  Greg

[Aimmath-developers] my personal branch in the repository?

[Gustav W D. <gus...@vi...>]

I have a computer at work and a computer at home and would like to do some
AIM development work on both. CVS would be the perfect solution for this if
I did a commit every time before switching computers. If I created a branch
for myself and committed to that branch, then this would not interfere with
the stability of the main trunk. Can those of you who are more familiar with
CVS than me please tell me if they think that this is a bad idea or if there
is an alternative solution? Otherwise I am planning to create my branch next
Tuesday.

Gustav

Re: [Aimmath-developers] my experiences with CVS under Windows

[Greg G. <gr...@ol...>]

Gustav W Delius wrote:
> 
> I have placed a short page with my experiences with CVS under Windows into
> the SourceForge DocManager at http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=44411.
> Installing and using WinCVS turned out to be extremely easy.
> 
> I encourage everyone to submit documents to the DocManager. After submitting
> files you still have to approve them before they become visible. You all
> have the necessary privilege. Use the Admin link, click on the document, and
> then change Status from pending to active.
> 
> Gustav

Dear Gustav,

I owe you an apology ... I made a very rudimentary start on what I'd offered
to do. I still have the much longer email on CVS in my directory waiting to be 
edited. I just got absolutely swamped with work here and haven't got back to
it. Our semester here has 3 weeks more to run. I think things will ease up a
little after next week. It will be interesting to read what the differences
are in using CVS from a Windows environment; I've only ever used it from a
Linux or other UNIX-like environment.

  Regards,
  Greg

[Aimmath-developers] CVS etiquette

[Gustav W D. <gus...@vi...>]

The only etiquette rules we have so far are:

1) Keep other developers informed about what you are up to by posting to the
developer's mailing list
aim...@li...

2)Before committing changes wait three days after having informed the other
developers of your intentions.

Should there be any others?

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] my experiences with CVS under Windows

[Gustav W D. <gus...@vi...>]

I have placed a short page with my experiences with CVS under Windows into
the SourceForge DocManager at http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=44411.
Installing and using WinCVS turned out to be extremely easy.

I encourage everyone to submit documents to the DocManager. After submitting
files you still have to approve them before they become visible. You all
have the necessary privilege. Use the Admin link, click on the document, and
then change Status from pending to active.

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] John Breitenbucher has joined the development team

[Gustav W D. <gus...@vi...>]

We now have 7 developers on SourceForge, see
http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=44411.

Gustav

[Aimmath-developers] Sixth Developer

[Gustav W D. <gus...@vi...>]

Manolis has joined the development team at SourceForge.

Gustav

RE: [Aimmath-developers] Dev. of the AIM CAA system + browser detection

[Chris S. <san...@fo...>]

Many thanks for the replies.

My concern is that there are a large number of potential users who do not
have access to Maple licences and therefore cannot use AIM.  With my
Learning and Teaching Support Network role, I think this is a problem.  
From the point of view as a staff member in maths and stats here in
Birmingham, of course, it is not.  I would like to investigate computer
algebra marking using a different CAS - ideally an open source one such as
Maxima.  This way the whole project becomes open source.

One added benefit of this is a guard against even stronger licence
restrictions from Maple in the future, or problems with future versions of
Maple.

I've been giving these options some thought.  Again I'm not as intimately
familiar with the AIM code as perhaps I should be, so this might simply be
impossible.  One idea is to have the core of the CAA system written in
something else - Java perhaps, and then call out to computer algebra only
where necessary.  Depending on what CAS is available there would be
differing levels of functionality.  Is this idea too ambitious?

There seems to concensus that initially at least we should polish AIM.  
So I'd certainly agree we start there - and depending on the project and
the programmer who is employed we can reassess.  This person will be
working on one other project in addition to AIM, so might not be a
mathematician at all.  This could be a problem of course and I'm going to
have a meeting tomorrow (Thursday 8th) to discuss these issues.

Thanks
Chris


On Wed, 7 May 2003, Greg Gamble wrote:

> On Tuesday, 6 May 2003 9:59 PM, Chris Sangwin wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > It was confirmed last week that I have been offered 2 days a week of a
> > programmers time for the next year to develop the AIM system, or some
> > other computer algebra assessments and learning system.  This is very
> > exciting as it gives us some very interesting opportunities.
> >
> > Since this could allow a very major re-write of AIM, I would very much
> > value your thoughts on how we should proceed.
> 
> Dear Chris,
> 
> Perhaps, you could start by suggesting what parts of AIM need a rewrite.
> There are some who hold the view that too much of aim-tth is written in
> in Maple and that much of this should actually be written in java. However,
> now that I have a little more experience with AIM, I'm not sure I agree
> with that idea. Personally, I still don't have the facility with java that
> I have with Maple, that I could just sit down and read code in it and
> understand how
> it works. So a shift from Maple to java would just make more of AIM
> inaccessible
> to me and possibly to be many others as well. I think what should be coded
> in
> Maple and what should be coded in java should be what seems the easiest to
> code with a leaning toward Maple, unless there is a performance reason for
> doing it differently.
> 
> What I would really like is a description of how the java code and
> `aim/Main`
> Maple code interact to generate the various pages. In particular, just how
> data is passed down to subsequent pages after a student logs in.
> 
> Perhaps, Ken or Neil could indicate any techniques they use to see what
> java is actually doing. I need some hints as to how to put in print
> statements
> etc. or do you actually use jdb?
> 
> One of the things I'm interested in doing is adding some browser detection
> into Alice.java. I've done some experiments along the lines of a suggestion
> Manolis Mavrikis when I sent a message entitled `Snag using Unicode' to the
> AIM list. Basically the idea is this, the login index.html page has some
> javascript at the top that defines a function that peels out of the
> userAgent
> string of a web browser enough info. to determine what browser it is (I've
> got this bit working ok ... it can even determine the operating system if
> that's useful). The idea is to then pass this browser information down with
> the student Id to subsequent web pages, and pass the option `-u' to tth
> if and only if the web browser is known to be fully Unicode capable (e.g.
> Mozilla and Netscape 6+). The mechanism could be exploited further, so
> that a message is printed on the login page warning of deficiencies of some
> browsers, e.g. IE 5 cannot render multiple levels of indices (e^(x^2) looks
> like e^(x*2)).
> 
> > Could we talk about this further?
> 
> Lets. I concur with Neil:
> 
> On Tuesday, 6 May 2003 10:31 PM, Neil wrote:
> > ...  However, I don't think that major rewriting
> > would be the best way to use this resource; there is no shortage of
> > straightforward development tasks that need to be done, and we
> > are only looking at 5 person-months of work, which is not all that
> > much given the learning curve and the scale of the system.
> 
> We need to concentrate on what's broken and features that are missing,
> and only rewrite code if it's a real mess.
> 
> Is there code, Chris, that you think is such a mess that it needs to
> be rewritten? ... or is it that you would like to see some Maple code
> rewritten as java? ... or is there some interface concept that is
> currently `wrong' in aim-tth? Exactly why do you think a rewrite is
> necessary?
> 
> When I read the Maple code, I see usage of RETURN, traperror etc.
> which one reads in the Maple documentation are deprecated. However,
> if one was to replace the traperror instances by try/catch would
> this make AIM no longer compatible with Maple 5/6?
> 
>   Regards,
>   Greg
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> Enterprise Linux Forum Conference & Expo, June 4-6, 2003, Santa Clara
> The only event dedicated to issues related to Linux enterprise solutions
> www.enterpriselinuxforum.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Aimmath-developers mailing list
> Aim...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aimmath-developers
> 

RE: [Aimmath-developers] Dev. of the AIM CAA system + browser detection

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

> When I read the Maple code, I see usage of RETURN, traperror etc.
> which one reads in the Maple documentation are deprecated. However,
> if one was to replace the traperror instances by try/catch would
> this make AIM no longer compatible with Maple 5/6?

I was wondering about the same thing. However it occurred to me that given
that the use of Maple requires a site license anyway and that any
institution with a site license is going to have an up-to date version of
Maple anyway we do not really need to maintain compatibility with earlier
versions of Maple. Is that reasoning correct?

Gustav

RE: [Aimmath-developers] File headers, cvs doc'n, ...

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

> perhaps you could have another look at the proposed directory 
> structure and the concept of a ROOT path for includes that I 
> submitted previously
> >   AIM/
> >      dev/    # information etc. useful for developers, howtos etc.
> >      etc/    # scripts for packaging etc.
> >      example/# sample quiz files
> >      images/ # not present at Sourceforge
> >      WEB_INF/

I have no objections to the directory structure proposed by Greg. 

Gustav

RE: [Aimmath-developers] Dev. of the AIM CAA system + browser detection

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Tuesday, 6 May 2003 9:59 PM, Chris Sangwin wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> It was confirmed last week that I have been offered 2 days a week of a
> programmers time for the next year to develop the AIM system, or some
> other computer algebra assessments and learning system.  This is very
> exciting as it gives us some very interesting opportunities.
>
> Since this could allow a very major re-write of AIM, I would very much
> value your thoughts on how we should proceed.

Dear Chris,

Perhaps, you could start by suggesting what parts of AIM need a rewrite.
There are some who hold the view that too much of aim-tth is written in
in Maple and that much of this should actually be written in java. However,
now that I have a little more experience with AIM, I'm not sure I agree
with that idea. Personally, I still don't have the facility with java that
I have with Maple, that I could just sit down and read code in it and
understand how
it works. So a shift from Maple to java would just make more of AIM
inaccessible
to me and possibly to be many others as well. I think what should be coded
in
Maple and what should be coded in java should be what seems the easiest to
code with a leaning toward Maple, unless there is a performance reason for
doing it differently.

What I would really like is a description of how the java code and
`aim/Main`
Maple code interact to generate the various pages. In particular, just how
data is passed down to subsequent pages after a student logs in.

Perhaps, Ken or Neil could indicate any techniques they use to see what
java is actually doing. I need some hints as to how to put in print
statements
etc. or do you actually use jdb?

One of the things I'm interested in doing is adding some browser detection
into Alice.java. I've done some experiments along the lines of a suggestion
Manolis Mavrikis when I sent a message entitled `Snag using Unicode' to the
AIM list. Basically the idea is this, the login index.html page has some
javascript at the top that defines a function that peels out of the
userAgent
string of a web browser enough info. to determine what browser it is (I've
got this bit working ok ... it can even determine the operating system if
that's useful). The idea is to then pass this browser information down with
the student Id to subsequent web pages, and pass the option `-u' to tth
if and only if the web browser is known to be fully Unicode capable (e.g.
Mozilla and Netscape 6+). The mechanism could be exploited further, so
that a message is printed on the login page warning of deficiencies of some
browsers, e.g. IE 5 cannot render multiple levels of indices (e^(x^2) looks
like e^(x*2)).

> Could we talk about this further?

Lets. I concur with Neil:

On Tuesday, 6 May 2003 10:31 PM, Neil wrote:
> ...  However, I don't think that major rewriting
> would be the best way to use this resource; there is no shortage of
> straightforward development tasks that need to be done, and we
> are only looking at 5 person-months of work, which is not all that
> much given the learning curve and the scale of the system.

We need to concentrate on what's broken and features that are missing,
and only rewrite code if it's a real mess.

Is there code, Chris, that you think is such a mess that it needs to
be rewritten? ... or is it that you would like to see some Maple code
rewritten as java? ... or is there some interface concept that is
currently `wrong' in aim-tth? Exactly why do you think a rewrite is
necessary?

When I read the Maple code, I see usage of RETURN, traperror etc.
which one reads in the Maple documentation are deprecated. However,
if one was to replace the traperror instances by try/catch would
this make AIM no longer compatible with Maple 5/6?

  Regards,
  Greg

[Aimmath-developers] File headers, cvs doc'n, ...

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

> On Monday, 28 April 2003 5:27 PM, Gustav wrote:
> GG> One other thing I'd like to see is version Id strings
> GG> at the top of each file.
> > That sounds like a very good idea. Would you be able to add these
> > strings to all the files and commit them?

Dear team,

(Welcome Chris ... I see you have been added to the developers list).
I finally got around to adding the Id strings to all the .mpl and .java
files, yesterday (Monday 5 May). Other files for now don't have them.
The Id version strings are only really useful in files which have some
likelihood of changing, and should of course, not be added to generated
files like .class files.

On Fri, 2 May 2003 12:14:54 +0100, Gustav wrote:
> I am looking forward to reading your cvs documentation. I think a
> good place
> to put it would be the DocManager on SourceForge. You have privileges to
> place and edit documentation there (in fact I have given all of us this
> privilege).

I submitted a file there of about 13 lines (basically as a test). It seems
this has to go through some approval process. So I didn't see it on the
system for a while. I think I might create the file in plain text and
put it a directory dev/ on the system as I had first suggested I might.
I have a perl script I wrote that converts an appropriately formatted
text file to HTML. If it seems useful I might add that script into
another directory etc/. Anyway, once I have the file with the content I want
and a version of it appropriately HTML-marked-up (as DocManager really
requires it) I'll change the documentation file from `pending' to `active'.

> GG> A few months back, I sent some info. on what I called a Trig package.
> GG> I'm thinking that I could add that into the distribution, along with
> GG> sample quiz files. In fact, I think Neil's sample quiz files could
also
> GG> be included on Sourceforge.
>
> I don't think that sample question files should go into cvs because they
do
> not really be developed by us as a team. Rather the important thing is
that
> they should be easily accessible by the non-developers.

The Trig package I mentioned comprises a few .mpl files
(aim/{Trig.mpl,GGUtil0.mpl}) as well as a number of examples. It was
based on Neil's Diff.mpl and examples. It was only after I saw how Neil
had used the Diff.mpl (and Int.mpl) functions in his examples that I
realised the usefulness of those Diff.mpl (and Int.mpl) functions.
Thus I see those sample questions as an important part of the documentation
of Diff.mpl (and Int.mpl).

This is also the case with my Trig package. The sample questions I have
help to explain what the functions in aim/{Trig.mpl,GGUtil0.mpl} are for.
Now that we have the aim-tth distribution on Sourceforge, I will add/commit
these files after changing the name of the latter to say aim/Util2.mpl.
In light of the view that sample quiz questions like those mentioned above
should be considered part of the documentation, perhaps you could have
another look at the proposed directory structure and the concept of a
ROOT path for includes that I submitted previously:

> > We should think about a standard directory for
> > these: example perhaps with subdirectories. This brings up another idea.
> > Perhaps we could have some notion of a ROOT path for includes. Let's
> > say at the AIM (= ROOT) level we have directories:
> >
> >   AIM/
> >      dev/    # information etc. useful for developers, howtos etc.
> >      etc/    # scripts for packaging etc.
> >      example/# sample quiz files
> >      images/ # not present at Sourceforge
> >      WEB_INF/
> >
> > Does that sound reasonable.

A word on the images/ directory ... Neil had a few triangle .gifs that
I found useful in my own quiz files. I think others might find them
useful too, and there may well be other .gifs of general utility.
Again, it would be useful to have a ROOT path concept for images.

On Fri May 2 20:14:42 2003, Neil wrote:
> SourceForge gives us space for a web site as well as the CVS
> repository.  I think we should move everything from
> aim.shef.ac.uk/aimsource to SourceForge, including my sample
> questions, and any questions that anyone else wants to contribute.
> I will volunteer to do this. In the longer term, I think we should set
> up mechanisms so that questions offered for public distribution are
> stored and managed on the authors' AIM servers rather than on a
> central site.

This of course is the other reason for having sample questions.
Having a directory where one can `drop in' such questions and
some sort of ROOT path concept, would make it easy to include such
questions. It would also be good to have some sort of manifest
(README) for such question files that lists the name of the quiz
file, with a brief description and any keywords it might contain.
A script that peels this information from the quiz files would
be the way to do it ... another candidate for etc/ ... I can
put together such a script in perl. I think the sample questions
ought to have its own special directory outside the WEB-INF/root
tree. Thoughts?

  Regards,
  Greg

RE: [Aimmath-developers] Development of the AIM CAA system

[Gustav W D. <gw...@yo...>]

> It was confirmed last week that I have been
> offered 2 days a week of a programmers time
> for the next year to develop the AIM system,
> or some other computer algebra assessments
> and learning system.

Wonderful! I have immediately taken the opportunity to add another feature
request to the list on SourceForge. I think there will be no shortage of
work.

Gustav

Re: [Aimmath-developers] Development of the AIM CAA system

[Neil S. <N.P...@sh...>]

That's excellent news.  However, I don't think that major rewriting 
would be the best way to use this resource; there is no shortage of 
straightforward development tasks that need to be done, and we 
are only looking at 5 person-months of work, which is not all that 
much given the learning curve and the scale of the system.

Neil

> 
> Dear all,
> 
> It was confirmed last week that I have been offered 2 days a week of a
> programmers time for the next year to develop the AIM system, or some
> other computer algebra assessments and learning system.  This is very
> exciting as it gives us some very interesting opportunities.
> 
> Since this could allow a very major re-write of AIM, I would very much
> value your thoughts on how we should proceed.   
> 
> I will ensure that whatever developments are made, AIM users are
> included and their needs addressed.  I will also try to ensure that
> old question sets for AIM-TTH are useable on the new system.
> 
> Could we talk about this further?
> 
> Chris
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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[Aimmath-developers] Development of the AIM CAA system

[Chris S. <san...@fo...>]

Dear all,

It was confirmed last week that I have been offered 2 days a week of a
programmers time for the next year to develop the AIM system, or some
other computer algebra assessments and learning system.  This is very
exciting as it gives us some very interesting opportunities.

Since this could allow a very major re-write of AIM, I would very much
value your thoughts on how we should proceed.   

I will ensure that whatever developments are made, AIM users are included
and their needs addressed.  I will also try to ensure that old question
sets for AIM-TTH are useable on the new system.

Could we talk about this further?

Chris

RE: [Aimmath-developers] Re: Sourceforge messages

[<N.P...@sh...>]

SourceForge gives us space for a web site as well as the CVS 
repository.  I think we should move everything from 
aim.shef.ac.uk/aimsource to SourceForge, including my sample 
questions, and any questions that anyone else wants to contribute. 
I will volunteer to do this. In the longer term, I think we should set 
up mechanisms so that questions offered for public distribution are 
stored and managed on the authors' AIM servers rather than on a 
central site.

Neil