A Scaleable Online Programming Platform for Software Engineering Education

Abstract

Programming is solving problems with computer assistance. Learning the craft of programming is a challenging task for most computer science students. It requires a high amount of training to get into the mindset of a good software engineer, and many students lack this training. A promising way to compensate this lack is the provision of an easily accessible learning platform where students can find several programming assignments that are fun to solve, ideally on the platform itself. In this paper, we present the architecture of an online programming practice platform that provides a fully featured online IDE, running in any modern browser and offering fast feedback on provided solutions. It is deployed in a scalable state-of-the-art cloud-infrastructure based on a microservice architecture to ensure a stable and extensible software system.