[Edu-sig] Crunchy news

[Andre Roberge]

Hi everyone,

Over the holiday, Johannes and I have been working on complementary
parts of crunchy and quite a bit of progress has been accomplished.
While we are not quite ready to do a nicely packaged release (with
updated documentation), I thought I should point out the existence of
a new home and public svn repository from which it can be checked out.

The url is http://code.google.com/p/crunchy/source

If you are curious, feel free to check out the code, try it out, and
give us some feedback.

Crunchy has now evolved from a single program into a suite which
consists of three main parts:

Crunchy itself: Transform a specially marked-up html-based Python
tutorial into an interactive tutorial viewed within a webbrowser
(Firefox support)
Crunchy has changed significantly since the last (0.7) release.  Among
the many changes, it now features a 'real' editor embedded in the
browser.

While doing the required markup to transform an html-based tutorial
into a crunchy-ready one is pretty straightforward, a new tool has
been developed that greatly facilitate the task.
This new program is currently named Chewy.

Both of these are in the branch labeled "andre" of the above mentioned
svn repository, and are fully functional.  I'm hoping to have
something very close to a 1.0 version released for both Chewy and
Crunchy by Pycon 2007.  By then, the name *may* have changed to
something "more serious".

In Johannes's branch (johann), you can find the beginning of a server
that could be used in a classroom environment.  Its code name is
Crispy (although you won't find a file by that name), and it is not
yet doing anything really useful, but should in the near future.

In addition, Johannes has has started to work on Crinkly, a
sub-project of Crispy, designed to do automatic grading of student
(doctest-based) assignments.  This has not yet found its way in the
repository.

André