As of now, the OpenGrader is still an idea. I haven’t had any time to develop it, though its idea is evolve over time.

But hey! Look at my sentence: ‘Most user of contest environment already know how to code’. What is it again? Why do we need an easy to use contest environment with beautiful admin UI?

And there is Patta Grader, which took minimalist design with all code-base configuration.

Now the decision come when I am in need of immediate contest environment to use within two weeks (it is due on next Monday the 13th). If I have set up my server with Ubuntu 10.04LTS already, I would install cafe-grader within a blink of eyes. But since I still run Ubuntu 9.04, I can’t. (I don’t trust Ubuntu dist-upgrade) So far, I decided to take minimalist design with both web and grader, and now I present you the qGrader!

qGrader is a small and swift contest environment. Though it is very small, it is fast and I think it can handle load of hundreds users well (if run on Unix; Windows grader is far too slow). Currently the implementation uses SQLite database (I’m quite addicted to its dynamic typing), but if migrated to MySQL or larger RDBMS, it would run tons faster.

The downside of this system is that there is no central grading procedure for each task. Each task must have its own grading procedure (written in PHP, as is all the system except sandbox). There is built-in procedure for standard batch-type task for easily use, but you still have to write code.

But I consider this a very big advantage. It allow basically every type of task to be usable on this system. And I believe with a few adjustment, you could easily move the task and use system to be database-based too.

Currently I am testing it (I wrote it in past two days). I might write summary page, for all task and each task. An admin interface for managing task and user (directly writing to file). But I don’t think I will write a MySQL part for it — for me SQLite is enough and is for more easier to write and use.

Contact me if you want to try the grader. I don’t think I will ever published it. The code is real mess (the web part is coded in only one PHP file and several CSS and images and the the grader is also one big file with two of utilities file (for task grader))