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How To Build and Test PencilCode

Build Status First install the prerequisites: git, nodejs, and grunt. Then:

git clone https://github.com/PencilCode/pencilcode.git
cd pencilcode
npm install
grunt

Development can be done on Linux, Mac, or Windows. The prerequisites are a standard node.js development environment which is very widely used, plus grunt (you'll need to npm install -g grunt-cli).

Prerequisites

First, you need git, which is easy. On Linux, just sudo apt-get install git or sudo yum install git-core if you don't have it.

Second, you need node.js (which is the node and npm binaries) and grunt (which is the build tool popular in the node.js community). The Ubuntu and Debian packages for node.js are pretty old, so don't just apt-get install the packages. Get and build the latest node and npm and grunt binaries as follows:

(For Linux:)

mkdir -p /tmp/nodejs && cd /tmp/nodejs
wget -N http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz
tar xzvf node-*.tar.gz && cd `ls -d node-v*`
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
make install
echo 'export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
npm install -g grunt-cli

Zsh users should change bashrc to zshrc in the above code.

(For Mac:)

mkdir -p /tmp/nodejs && cd /tmp/nodejs
curl http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz > node-latest.tar.gz
tar xzvf node-latest.tar.gz && cd `ls -rd node-v*`
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
make install
echo 'export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile
source ~/.profile
npm install -g grunt-cli

The above drops all the built binaries into ~/local/bin so you don't need root.

On the Mac, git comes from Apple (you can get it as part of the Command line tools for XCode), and if you'd rather not build it, node.js can be installed from http://nodejs.org/download/. You will still need to sudo npm install -g grunt-cli.

On Windows, git can be installed from here: http://git-scm.com/download/win and node.js can be installed from here: http://nodejs.org/download/. Windows development is untested, but if you try it, let me know.

Because node.js does not work on cygwin, when I work with node.js on a Windows box, I just run it with debian under a vbox instance https://www.virtualbox.org/.

How To Experiment with PencilCode

To experiment with PencilCode, you will want to run a local copy of the site's frontend.

To start the https version of the dev server (by default it runs on localhost:8008):

grunt devserver

(Without the s it runs http instead of https.)

To use the devserver, modify DNS resolution so *.pencilcode.net.dev points to localhost. For example, with chrome on OSX, add a couple aliases to your .profile by running the following:

cat >> ~/.profile <<EOF
alias chrome="/Applications/Google\\ \\Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\\ \\Chrome"
alias devchrome='chrome --host-resolver-rules="MAP *pencilcode.net.dev localhost:8008" --user-data-dir=$HOME/devchrome --ignore-certificate-errors http://pencilcode.net.dev/'
EOF
source ~/.profile

And then "devchrome" will launch an instance of Chrome with the right proxy.

On Linux, add something like this to your .bashrc:

alias devchrome='google-chrome --host-resolver-rules="MAP *pencilcode.net.dev localhost:8008" --user-data-dir=$HOME/devchrome --ignore-certificate-errors http://pencilcode.net.dev/'

On Windows:

You can set up command line options for the Canary Chrome shortcut, with the following options.

--host-resolver-rules="MAP *pencilcode.net.dev localhost:8008" --ignore-certificate-errors https://pencilcode.net.dev/"

When running devchrome, any URL with a hostname that ends with ".dev" will be routed to the development server. Visit https://pencilcode.net.dev/ to browse your local copy of the website.

PencilCode Internals

The structure of pencilcode is really simple.

  • It is a single HTML file content/src/editor.html that does all the work All pencilcode.net/edit/... URLs resolve to this static file.
  • The javascript behind editor.html is in the src/ directory (symlink to content/src). These javascript files are combined and minified into content/src/editor.js by the build.
  • The editor javascript does JSON requests to pencilcode.net/load/... and pencilcode.net/save/... to read and write actual data.
  • There are a bunch of other static files that can be found in content.

JSON save and load

To get a sense for the protocol used by /load/ and /save/, just try hitting the URLs directly in your browser. For example, visit http://guide.pencilcode.net/load/ to see the JSON response for a directory listing. To see the details of how /load/ and /save/ work, see the code in site/wsgi.

The production site is an nginx server, configured in nginx/nginx_site.conf.

The devserver is simpler: it is a node.js proxy server. When using the devserver, the proxy.pac will direct the requests to your local dev server, and the dev server will produce editor.html (and its related javascript) for /edit/ urls. The devserver does not do any storage - it forwards /load/ and /save/ to the live website on pencilcode.net.

Editor view and storage and controller

The PencilCode editor is broken into three main pieces:

  • editor-storage.js is the storage layer. It deals with the protocol for talking to /load/ and /save/ URLs, and it also does local caching, offline storage, and backup. Someday when we build a fully offline version of PencilCode, or when we adapt it to use Google Drive for storage, the major work will be in this file.
  • editor-view.js is the UI for the development environement. It knows how ot show directory listings, source code editors, and framed run sandboxes. Other UI affordances: login dialog box UI, a butter bar notification, and whizzy horizontal animated transitions. The idea is that the view doesn't do any thinking for itself: it just does rendering and surfaces events.
  • editor-main.js is the controller logic. This is the main "business logic" for the editor and sets out what happens whenever something happens. It loads and saves things from the storage and pours the data into the view; and it responds to events that come from the view.

The view and the main logic are a bit large and probably should be refactored into further smaller pieces.

Roadmap

Improvements we'd like to make in PencilCode are in several basic directions:

  1. Better Debugging. That means highlighting lines as they run, ultimately giving kids the ability to stop and step programs, and visualize their program state (their variables).
  2. A Block Language. That means something like blockly, or maybe something new. The goal is to make it easy to use on the tablet while also making it easy for beginners to quickly build programs by multiple-choice.
  3. Richer Libraries. The turtle is fun, but we want to point the way for students to do many other things: 3d, math, games, presentations, music, and so on.
  4. A Learning Framework. Students should be given more guidance on which concepts to learn next. This could be in the form of automatic tips, better editor warning messages, exercises, or just better (e.g., more visual) navigation throught he site.
  5. Community Tools. The site has grown to more than 1000 users pretty quickly. There should be ways to leave comments on on other peoples' sites. The UI for creating URLs to share your work should be easier. And it should be easier to do basic things like change your website name, or find your site once you have forgotten its name.
  6. Better UI. Lots of little examples. Here is one: instead of navigating projects by name only, it should be possible to navigate them visually. After you run a project, we should capture a bitmap of the drawing and serve thumbnails.

We are always looking for more ideas too.

david.bau@gmail.com