Coderiu: a cloud platform for computer programming e-learning

The need for powerful and flexible platforms for teaching and learning computer programming concepts is increasing due to the growing number of interested attendees. Although implementing a complete platform from scratch would achieve the best flexibility in terms of possible features, it also requires a huge time-consuming effort. This paper proposes Coderiu, a platform built on top of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) packages suitably integrated to implement the desired learning platform. Such features include platform independence of code editing, which is achieved by leveraging a web-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The environment is extended with custom features to enable the automated testing of the solutions and the automatic remote backup of the working directories. Moreover, the architecture was made suitable to be used in classroom exams, which require a controlled environment. A critical aspect of the Coderiu platform, beside the integration of its components and modules, is represented by the scalability. The Coderiu platform is used by hundreds of students in case of courses in relatively small classes, while it is ready to serve a larger user base in the future. For this reason, requirements and performance are studied on a pilot installation to derive insights regarding the resources required for larger deployments.