It’s hard to believe it’s already week 5 of the semester. We’ve made some important decisions about the direction that we hope to take Linguine in, but there’s still much more to be done. After looking over the challenges and obstacles faced by last year’s team, we’ve made the difficult decision not to continue developing with the Eclipse RCP framework.
While RCP certainly seems to be a powerful technology, its steep learning curve combined with the struggles it caused last year and its relative lack of documentation dissuaded us from using it.
Instead, we’re going to be developing a web application. We’ve also chosen to develop primarily in Python (though more detailed architecture decisions still need to be made). A web application will be naturally cross-platform and easy to use in a classroom setting.
While it’s exciting to have a direction to move forward in, there’s still a lot more decisions to be made. We’ve identified some preliminary features that we’ll be implementing, but we’re still in the process of coming up with detailed requirements and finding some of the less obvious use cases that are needed for the system but don’t necessarily correspond directly with a requested feature.
There’s still a lot of planning to be done before we begin coding, but we hope to start active development as soon as possible. We’ll be using an iterative development process, and we’ll start user testing in late November, probably after our third iteration.