Still in the alpha stages, the CPLA Grader is being built quickly and efficiently. About a week and a half into the project, I’ve already finished the assignment grading/creating & editing/submitting portions of the site, and have put a base style on it. Login and registration also work, and all the base calculations for grade point averages have been put in.

What’s left? Refining form styles, for one. The error messages that Zend has by default (for incorrectly submitted form values) are a bit…cryptic to say the least. In fact, I wonder if they are written in English or some computer jargon. Take for instance: “‘admin’ is no valid email address in the basic format local-part@hostname”. Is no valid email address? Yes, I get that, but who says “blah blah is no valid email address”? Instead, why not say something like, “blah blah is not a valid email address.” Or how about when you put in CSRF protection into a form – “The two given tokens don’t match.” For a user, this would be a WTF moment when they go and try to submit a form. What tokens? What do I have to fix? How about, instead, “You need to resubmit this form again because you took too darn long to fill it out or you decided to use a back button or something. Just resubmit the form and don’t worry about it, this is here for your own good.” I know, I can change the error messages with a few custom function calls, but I felt like ranting about it.

The other section to finish would be the Admin section, however, it is not an essential part to the program at this point. What I mainly focused on was getting the student view operational – the admin stuff is for my view anyways, and can be postponed (but won’t, because I’m a good little programmer).

That’s pretty much it. Zend is a pretty powerful framework as I’ve learned, and it reminds me of Ruby on Rails…in fact, it’s kind of spooky how similar their concepts of web development are (minus the language choice, of course). It made development go insanely quickly (I don’t have to manually write queries for the DB!!!1!!) and was an overall useful endeavor for me (though it did have a learning curve at first, which had me searching madly through Google when Zend’s API forgot to mention specifics to certain topics).

Also, special thanks to the folks at Atlas Networks for helping me set up the environment for hosting this application.

Work has officially begun on the CPLA Grader – an independent project being developed solely by myself for the purposes of creating an easy to use online grading system customized specifically for my CPLA class. The idea behind it was to create something that could do all the work for me in terms of managing grades – where I didn’t have to work in a restricted environment fighting with various limitations of the system. Like, for instance, if I want to download everybody’s submitted files at once, I can – unlike in myitlab, where you have to download everyone’s file ONE AT A TIME for 60 students for EVERY ASSIGNMENT. Furthermore, in myitlab, if you didn’t put the grades and comments in just the right section, they wouldn’t show up uniformly. Not to mention that myitlab only works in Internet Explorer, which makes it virtually impossible for me to work from a linux machine on it. Muff cabbage.

Yes, customized software is a pain to make by principle. In this case, though, the overall time expenditure of fighting with myitlab on pulling out my grades and working with it would be more than building my own customized system. A little more work in the beginning will make my life easier in the long run.

Specifics on the internal project – the code will be designed using PHP with a Zend framework. The default dojo javascript library has been thrown out in favor of jQuery (I already have to learn a new PHP framework, why bother learning a new javascript framework as well?). The database will be powered by MySQL – yeah, I know, Postgres or something else should have been used, but I am most familiar with MySQL, and it works for this project. This blog will more or less be a front-site to the grader once it becomes available (hopefully by next quarter).