RCOS Application Fall 2011

The Koala Project is a web-based, easy to use, programming environment designed to introduce potential programmers to the basics of coding. It requires virtually no setup to use, and allows users to quickly create useful and entertaining web apps which can distributed to friends and family. If you can use a web browser, you can create a web app.

The Koala Project website hosts the development environment itself and a community of Koala programmers. Built on open source values, every program's source code is by default available to every other programmer. It's easy to contribute to others' projects or derive a new one using code snippets from others. Authors are automatically credited for any code written. This system, we hope, will start programmers out right; with open source in mind.

Numerous web technologies are employed to make The Koala Project possible, including Javascript, CSS3, HTML4.1/5, PHP5, and Ruby. Care is taken to keep everything as lightweight as possible, which means heavy frameworks such as JQuery are avoided. The user interface runs on native Javascript which is heavily tested to provide the lightest and fastest experience possible.

Development on Koala began spring of 2011 by support of RCOS (the Rensselaer Center for Open Source). During this time, the code editor and parser, as well as foundations for the rest of the development environment, were put in place. In the summer of 2011, Nick Pachulski joined the team, and thanks again to the support of RCOS, a backend was developed to support the database and user management functions of the website.

Further development on The Koala Project is scheduled to take place this fall. Milestones include (at approximately 2 week intervals):

• Assimilate backend work done over summer by unifying the appearance and structure
• Integrate front end functionality with backend database
• Serialize program data to be stored and shared to other users
• Further koala-script by adding keywords and control structures
• Add inline error detection and polish off the compilation core
• Release beta1 to the public and start building a community
• Start work on a GUI builder for koala-apps