Development of a Web-based Front-end Environment to Aid Programming Lectures on Unix-like Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the details of the design and implementation of our Front-end Environment for Hands-on Activities (FEHA), which is a web-based programming environment. FEHA provides a programming environment on the web and utilizes existing Unix-like systems that equip a specialized programming environment as the build and runtime platform. FEHA controls the existing systems by using Secure SHell (SSH) and Rsync without any modification of the existing systems. We discuss a case study of FEHA in which it was applied to actual programming lectures at a university. In the lectures, 70% of the students completed registrations to use FEHA in about 3 min. In addition, they could understand how to use the FEHA and started submitting codes within several minutes after the registration. The case study shows that FEHA is able to provide a specialized programming environment for more than 100 students with a small amount of effort from the instructor and system administrator.