[Edu-sig] Electronic assignment submission?

[Jason Cunliffe]

> I'm looking for a system to hand in programming assignments
> electronically, and return them to the students (IMHO, a trickier
> problem). Web, email or other, ideally running on a freenix server
> (BSD).
>
> It would be fun to write my own, and I've been looking at pulling mail
> attachments via IMAP and the MIME tools, or some sort of Web script.
> But if it's already out there...

Try looking at Zope => http://zope.org
It is a powerful web application framework. 100% Python. Free openSource,
cross-platform. Lots of plug-in openSource 'products' are available. I am pretty
sure at least some of those may do exactly what you want.

Several people on this list are using it. Zope is many things to many people.
Swiss army knife of web and content management. Perhaps overkill, perhaps not.
You can leverage against some wonderful features, supported by the generous,
dedicated momentum of a solid community. That community is half users who
install other's toolkits and script with them, and the hard-core developer
pushing-the-envelope Zopistas reinventing everything all the time, planning the
better brighter future. [consumer warning: Zope can be addictive!]

As a turnkey deal, it is painless to download and install. In 10 minutes you
will have a full web-server with FTP access into a powerful object database
[ZODB]. Then use the built-in components to start creating your site/application
through the HTML interface and/or via other tools.  If there is some special
feature you need, check the contributed component lists and download and install
those as you need. Most

Importing and exporting the site or parts of it is very easy to do. The same
.zexp [Zope export] file can be saved from one machine and installed on another
remotely. That includes cross-platform. Provided there are no special external
dependencies  you can imedateialy immediately working. It is thus quite common
to find people developing on laptop in Zope using Windows, but also transferring
or backing up work to a remote Linux server.

Built-in search and cataloguing, as well as fine-grained permission control,
make Zope excellent for the type of content management workflow you may want to
do. Most admin is done entirely through web forms. Zope is very modular and now
template driven, so presentation and features can change with context. Your can
program directly using external Python scripts which use the Zope API. These
also act as a bridge to any other non-Zope python you want to use. Many well
known modules have been wrapped into Zope products - database adapters, image
processing, etc.

If you do use Zope but prefer a shell command line paradigm, then be sure to
check out Jerome Alet's ZShell:
http://cortex.unice.fr/~jerome/
http://www.librelogiciel.com/software/ZShell/action_Presentation

Zope.org is the community site, and the only way to really decide about Zope is
download and try it out yourself. The Zope mailing lists are high volume and
very responsive to all kinds of need and detail.
http://www.zope.org/Resources/MailingLists

Zope.com is the commercial home, and has some handy couch-potato tradeshow demos
in flash/quicktime:
http://www.zope.com/Demos
Also a client list and case studies:
http://www.zope.com/ZopeClientList
http://www.zope.com/CaseStudies


hth
good luck!
./Jason