Web-based Programming Environment Research Articles

Developing a Learning Data Collection Platform for Learning Analytics in Online Education

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most education has been conducted through online classes. While feedback and interaction between students and instructors are significant in programming education or engineering practice, online education today cannot satisfy these aspects of learning. Therefore, this study proposes a learning support system for programming education and presents the results of designing and implementing this system. The proposed system consists of an online development environment module, a learning monitoring module, and a learning support module. It also provides a web-based programming environment, real-time chat and code mirroring, error guide messages and related lectures, e-learning quizzes, and learning activity analysis features. The system standardizes the development environment between the instructor and students, helps students take the initiative in solving errors, and enables code-oriented interactions between the instructor and students. It also collects data from all learning situations in the database. Conducting a big data analysis with the collected data will enable individual guidance for students by finding errors that frequently occur in programming and recommending learning materials to solve them.

Evaluations of JaguarCode: A web-based object-oriented programming environment with static and dynamic visualization

To increase program comprehension and overcome learning obstacles of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), various visualization techniques have been adopted in educational OOP environments. Some provide software development with visual notations without source code, while others support programming with visual aids. Our research supports Java programming along with UML diagrams (class, object, and sequence) and dynamic execution traces of program synchronized in a web-based programming environment - JaguarCode. It aims to help students better understand the static structure and dynamic behavior of Java programs, as well as object-oriented design concepts. This paper reports on the evaluation results of JaguarCode to investigate its effectiveness and user satisfaction through quantitative and qualitative experiments. The experimental results revealed that having both static and dynamic visualizations did positively impact the correctness of program understanding and tracing problems, while the visual representations did affect students' understanding on the program execution of the problems to higher accuracy. It was also observed that students were satisfied with the aspects of those visualizations provided in JaguarCode.

BomBart : Web-based Programming Environment Support to Graphic User Interface

BomBart : Web-based Programming Environment Support to Graphic User Interface

Islay3D—A Programming Environment for Authoring Interactive 3D Animations in Terms of State-Transition Diagram

An educational programming language is a programming language that is designed primarily as a learning instrument and not so much as a tool for writing programs for production. Three-dimensional (3D) interactive animations provide an effective means to engage the attention of the audience to learn programming language. Traditionally, creating 3D games had been difficult as it requires specialized programming skills. However, it had been proven that the state-transition diagram, which is the most fundamental principle for automata, is intuitively so comprehensive that even children can create programs for interactive animations and video games in the two-dimensional world. Islay3D is a programming environment for authoring interactive 3D animations based on this concept. In this paper, the Islay3D animation language is introduced, where a character is modeled as an object, and its behavior is defined in term of a set of state-transition diagrams. The interpretation of the state-transition diagrams to JavaScript is also presented. Finally, the web-based programming environment is introduced. With the web-based platform, the public will be able express their creativity in creating interactive 3D animations and video games easily from within their browser.

Minimizing the ripple effect of web-centric software by using the pheromone extension

The ripple effect metric shows what impact changes to a software will likely have on the rest of the system. In web-based data analysis, it has become a widespread practice to deploy both the script and the program developed with a high-level programming language software tool. Due to different vendors and the diversified philosophies behind different software tools, it may be slightly difficult to cope with the ripple effect across them. This paper initiates an experimental idea to minimize the wrapper interface ripple for web-based script tools and high-level programming environments and also indicates many potential research directions for the development of computationally intelligent tools in the software engineering domain that demand lower cost and less complexity. This work incorporates Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and its prime artifact pheromone, which has been modified as a pheromone extension module to minimize ripples when cross-coding. A standard benchmark data set has been taken to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

WAPPEN

This poster presents an Eclipse RCP-based application framework named Wappen for learning programming, and especially, its plugin for Bison and Flex. In courses such as compiler construction and programming languages, learners have to use multiple languages. Time and e ort spent by learners on installation and configuration of programming environments are not negligible. Wappen provides an infrastructure on which teachers can arrange simple Web-based programming environments for various programming languages by writing plug-ins. Wappen for Oolong has been successfully used in our compiler construction lab, where Oolong is an assembly language for the Java Virtual Machine. This poster introduces Wappen for Bison/Flex that tries to help learners avoid pitfalls of Bison/Flex in some respects. It is planned to be put into practical use in our compiler construction lab this year.

BioLingua: a programmable knowledge environment for biologists.

BioLingua is an interactive, web-based programming environment that enables biologists to analyze biological systems by combining knowledge and data through direct end-user programming. BioLingua embeds a mature symbolic programming language in a frame-based knowledge environment, integrating genomic and pathway knowledge about a class of similar organisms. The BioLingua language provides interfaces to numerous state-of-the-art bioinformatic tools, making these available as an integrated package through the novel use of web-based programmability and an integrated Wiki-based community code and data store. The pilot instantiation of BioLingua, which has been developed in collaboration with several cyanobacteriologists, integrates knowledge about a subset of cyanobacteria with the Gene Ontology, KEGG and BioCyc knowledge bases. We introduce the BioLingua concept, architecture and language, and give several examples of its use in complex analyses. Extensive documentation is available online at http://nostoc.stanford.edu/Docs/index.html JShrager@Stanford.edu

TOWARDS WEB-BASED COMPUTING

In a problem solving environment for geometric computing, a graphical user interface, or GUI, for visualization has become an essential component for geometric software development. In this paper we describe a visualization system, called GeoJAVA, which consists of a GUI and a geometric visualization library that enables the user or algorithm designer to (1) execute and visualize an existing algorithm in the library or (2) develop new code over the Internet. The library consists of geometric code written in C/C++. The GUI is written using the Java programming language. Taking advantage of the socket classes and system-independent application programming interfaces (API's) provided with the Java language, GeoJAVA offers a platform independent environment for distributed geometric computing that combines Java and C/C++. Users may remotely join a "channel" or discussion group in a location transparent manner to do collaborative research. The visualization of an algorithm, a C/C++ program located locally or remotely and controlled by a "floor manager", can be viewed by all the members in the channel through a visualization sheet called GeoJAVASheet. A chat box is also provided to enable dialogue among the members. Furthermore, this system not only allows visualization of pre-compiled geometric code, but also serves as a web-based programming environment where the user may submit a geometric code, compile it with the libraries provided by the system, and visualize it directly over the web sharing it with other users immediately.

A critical analysis and evaluation of Web-based environments for program development

This paper provides a classification, review, and critical analysis of current Web-based interactive programming environments and tools that facilitate learning programming languages and concepts. The focal point of the paper is based on (1) categorizing available programming systems and tools into classes according to their pedagogical approaches; (2) reviewing individual systems; and (3) critically analyzing them according to established standards for instructional design. The paper is intended to provide those seeking to use these resources with a comprehensive survey of the available systems, their succinct evaluation, and their effectiveness.

Using Java and JavaScript in the Virtual Programming Laboratory: a Web-based parallel programming environment

The Virtual Programming Laboratory (VPL) is a Web-based virtual programming environment built based on a client–server architecture. The system can be accessed on any platform (Unix, PC or Mac) using a standard Java-enabled browser. Software delivery over the Web imposes a novel set of constraints on design. We outline the tradeoffs in this design space, motivate the choices necessary to deliver an application, and detail the lessons learned in the process. We discuss the role of Java and other Web technologies in the realization of the design. VPL facilitates the development and execution of parallel programs. The initial prototype supports high-level parallel programming based on Fortran 90 and High Performance Fortran (HPF), as well as explicit low-level programming with the MPI message-passing interface. Supplementary Java-based platform-independent tools for data and performance visualization are an integral part of the VPL. Pablo SDDF trace files generated by the Pablo performance instrumentation system are used for post-mortem performance visualization. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Editorial: Java for computational science and engineering - simulation and modeling

We are pleased to present a set of papers discussing the role of Java in Science and Engineering Simulation. These were presented at a small workshop with 45 participants at Syracuse on 16-17 December 1996. This was very successful, and a follow-up event will be sponsored by ACM in Las Vegas on 21 June 1997. The growing interest in this field is also supported by an email discussion list and other materials collected at the web site http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/javaforcse. Java and Web technology can be used in many areas of science and engineering computation. These include sophisticated user interfaces and coarse-grain integration of different modules in complex meta-applications. However, also interesting (and controversial) is perhaps the use of Java as the language used for the computationally intense parts of a scientific code. All these areas were discussed at the workshop, with promising initial results and studies reported in each case. Again applications were described both for large-scale event-driven and time-stepped simulations and also for smaller client-side applets aimed at education. The appeal of Java as a simulation language includes its object-oriented characteristics, elegant applet software distribution model and natural support of graphical user interfaces. There are also non-technical reasons to think Java will be very important. In particular, one expects children to learn Java naturally as part of their Web experiences. On entering University, I find it hard to believe that many will be willing to switch from Java to Fortran77 or Fortran90. The papers in this issue fall into five areas. The first paper (‘Java for parallel computing and as a general language for scientific and engineering simulation and modeling’ by Geoffrey C. Fox and Wojtek Furmanski) is a general overview and the next three (‘Optimizing Java bytecodes’ by Michal Cierniak an Wei Li; ‘Optimizing Java: theory and practice’ by Zoran Budimlic and Ken Kennedy; ‘Technologies for ubiquitous supercomputing: a Java interface to the Nexus communication system’ by Ian Foster, George K. Thiruvathukal and Steven Tuecke) describe base Java technology from optimized compilation to linkage with communication infrastructure. The next two papers (‘Java simulations for physics education’ by Simeon Warner, Simon Catterall and Edward Lipson; ‘Using Java and JavaScript in the Virtual Programming Laboratory: a Web-based parallel programming environment’ by Kivanc Dincer and Geoffrey C. Fox) describe uses of Java in both science and computer science education. Then we have two papers (‘Java's role in distributed collaboration by Marina Chen and James Cowie’; ‘Java enabling collaborative education, health care, and computing’ by Lukasz Beca, Gang Cheng, Geoffrey C. Fox, Tomasz Jurga, Konrad Olszewski, Marek Podgorny, Piotr Sokolowski and Krzysztof Walczak) centred on the fascinating field of collaboration. The last six papers study the critical area of parallel and distributed computing in Java. These discuss world-wide computing (‘SuperWeb: research issues in Java-based global computing’ by Albert D. Alexandrov, Maximilian Ibel, Klaus E. Schauser and Chris J. Scheiman), large-scale software integration with Java servers (‘WebFlow – a visual programming paradigm for Web/Java based coarse grain distributed computing’ by Dimple Bhatia, Vanco Burzevski, Maja Camuseva, Geoffrey Fox, Wojtek Furmanski and Girish Premchandran) and mobility (‘Resource-aware metacomputing’ by Anurag Acharya, M. Ranganathan and Joel Saltz). These three distributed computing studies are contrasted with three on parallel computing: ‘Automatically exploiting implicit parallelism in Java’ by Aart J. C. Bik and Dennis B. Gannon on shared memory; ‘SPMD programming in Java’ by Susan Flynn Hummel, Ton Ngo and Harini Srinivasan on the SPMD style, and ‘Experiments with “HP Java”’ by Bryan Carpenter, Yuh-Jye Chang, Geoffrey Fox, Donald Leskiw and Xiaoming Li on classic distributed memory data parallelism. Currently, it appears that Java promises the computational scientist programming environments which have both attractive user interfaces and high-performance execution. An important purpose of the first workshop and the follow-up events is to get a broad input and study of the issues in this field so that we can guide the rapidly moving Java juggernaut to be maximally effective for scientific and engineering computation. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.