Warning: Large refactoring is occuring in the master branch for version 0.3 and no attempt is being made to keep the master branch functional while this occurs. If you're interested in seeing an unbroken Galah see the v0.2stable branch (that is the version UCR has deployed).

Galah is an automated grading system geared towards processing computer programming assignments.

Professors are responsible for creating test harnesses for their assignments (and we made some tools that should help). Aside from that Galah does the rest of the work: running those tests inside of secure Virtual Machines, consolodating results into a database, and providing an interface for the students and teachers to see the results of the testing.

Galah aims to set itself apart from similar software suites by being language agnostic, scalable, secure, easy to use, and simple (more on Galah's goals). Check out this comparison to similar software. You can also take a look at these screenshots to get an idea of what using Galah is like.

Note: Most of the documentation concerns the code in the v0.2stable branch.

Documentation for Galah is maintained on the GitHub project's wiki. This documentation is meant to be useful to users of Galah, interested parties looking to see if Galah would be useful to them, and developers.

Version 0.2 is stable and deployed at UCR. Servicing 4 courses and 1000+ users every quarter.

Version 0.3 is in active development and involves large refactoring and restructuring of Galah's design. See this document for a description of the goals for the new version. In short, the model layer will be greatly expanded to allow for automated testing, Redis will replace ZeroMQ, and Galah's installation will be automated. The feature-set of the system is not expected to radically change.

This last year has been amazing. Galah has been put through so many trials and made it through most looking pretty good. There's still a lot of improvement to be made though. This next 4 months I (John Sullivan) will dedicate myself to making Galah as excellent as possible, and I'm very excited to do it. We are quickly approaching a time when we'll want to expand to other institutions and hopefully make some deals with publishers to create test harnesses in line with their text books. If you (kind reader) are interested in using this software, please sent me an email at john@galahgroup.com.

Also, happy New Years!

A rapid release cycle has started on the version 0.2 branch. Galah has been deployed at UCR and the full auto-testing functionality is being used. This week we had the first series of labs taking advantage of Galah and it went very well. Students seemed to appreciate the quickness and quality of the feedback they got. We'll be using the feedback from this round of labs and improving things appropriately.

We're on track for a stable 0.2 release by the time the next quarter start.

Version 0.1 has been released and is going into deployment at UCR :D. Any bug fixes to the current code will be committed to master and releases will be made following the pattern 0.1.RELEASE#, so the first bug fix release will be 0.1.1, and the thirteenth would be 0.1.13.

A new branch will be created named v0.2dev and development towards the 0.2 release will proceed there. Bug fixes made in master will be merged into that branch.

Changing version scheme to something a little less ridiculous. I don't really know what my version scheme was before but now I'll follow more standard conventions. MajorVersion.MinorVersion.Patch[rc#], in other words what you'd expect. I will refer to the previous release 0.1beta1 as 0.1rc1 from now on. The next "release" will be 0.1rc2. When I feel confident that a lot of the bugs are worked out we'll release 0.1.

Each component of Galah is pretty distinct and decoupled from the other componenets of Galah but I don't want to make multiple repositories for each unless each one grows very large in size (which they shouldn't), so there won't be seperate versioning for each component.

Version 0.1beta1 has been released. This release contains only galah.web and galah.db running without support for interacting with the testing backend. All functionality needed for deploying in a production environment is there and most of it is documented.

Exciting day today :).