CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/oss E805 kkn

Introduction

Expertiza is a web application where students can submit and peer-review learning objects (articles, code, web sites, etc). It is used in select courses at NC State and by professors at several other colleges and universities. It is an open source project developed on Ruby on Rails platform. More information on Expertiza can be found here. The source code can be forked and cloned for making modifications.

This wiki provides an insight into our contributions to the Open Source Software project Expertiza with main focus on the UI changes for reporting scores. Reporting score functionality is handled by controllers/grades_controller.rb and rendered by views/grades/_view_my_score.html.erb. Improved User Interface using JQuery is our contribution to Expertiza. This new elegant UI uses tabs instead of tables which makes it look elegant and renders faster. Subtle code and design challenges, changes and the motivation to implement this design have been explained further.

Project Description

The view_my_scores html.erb page is being slow-rendered. The page displays all the scores in a tabular form with reviews, metareviews, author feedback below each other. Everything is merged into one big html page, and this makes the view rendering a slow process. Also, the user interface is not aesthetically pleasing. The challenge here is to make appropriate changes to the views so that the rendering time becomes less as well as to improve the over-all look and feel of the score report page.

Design

We have implemented partial rendering for the HTML page. The tabs are created using JQuery. The advantage of using JQuery is that it enables a sleeker and cleaner interface on pages without requiring the page to be loaded all at once. The new view page is visually aesthetic as it separates the scoring tabs as well as the review tabs and each review is rendered only when the tab for that review is clicked on. Thereby this approach overcomes the previous issue of the entire page being rendered at once.

The implementation of this design involved the separation of the code that ……..

Future Work

In the current implementation of the model separate DB queries are made sequentially while the HTML page is being written. This increases the loading time of the page.The implementation would get a further performance boost if the underlying DB queries are fired independent of the….

Appendix

Set-Up issues: