Playing with Ostests data using the API

Ostests, the leading open source e-assessment software has a fully functional REST API.

We have published some client examples to show you how easily you can get and post data of a remote Ostests installation.

The examples are written in PHP and Guzzle, the best HTTP client out there when it comes to communicate with REST services in PHP.

Visit https://github.com/ostests/api-examples, checkout the code, play against your Ostests installation and take the most of the API.

Help us translate Ostests to more languages

If you wonder how can you contribute to the Ostests project without being a programmer, wonder no more!

Thanks to the Crowdin (a collaborative translation tool), you can now help us translate our beloved e-assessment software to your native language.

The steps to do so are easy:

1. Login into http://translations.ostests.org/
2. Visit the language you want to translate
3. Translate the English sentence or word to the destination language.

Let us know if there's something you don't understand, we also are here to help YOU.

Ostests and its open source licensing

If you're a Ostests user or developer, you already know it's open source, but could you tell us exactly under which open source license is it licensed?

When we had to take this decision, the only license it came to our minds was: Affero GPL (General public license) v3. Why that? Because is the one which better covers the use and distribution of open source software that runs on servers instead of running on desktops.

This license forces anyone who use the software to contribute back to it if the former improves the software. Even if this user offers the software on a SaaS (Software as a service) platform.

When we opened the source code we trusted on the community; If you detect any misuse of the license, please let us know. In the meantime, have fun!

Domain specific language for testing tools

In software development and domain engineering, a domain-specific language (DSL) is a programming language or specification language dedicated to a particular problem domain, a particular problem representation technique, and/or a particular solution technique.

That was a quote from the Wikipedia. What it means for Ostests is that we are working to have our own DSL, so that the Web interface won't be the only way to interact with the tests, questions and results living on the platform.

Imagine a SQL language and interpreter, but adapted to our idioms and that's what we have in our labs.

Before the public launch, take a peek on the next piece of code:

CREATE_TEST "Zend Certifieed Engineer"

  LANGUAGE "EN"

  TIME_AVAILABLE 30 MINUTES;

ADD_QUESTION "Question definition...?" TO "Zend Certifieed Engineer"

  TYPE MULTIPLE_CHOICE

  ANSWERS ( TRUE, "Foo" ), ( FALSE, "Bar" );

RUN_TEST "Zend Certifieed Engineer";

If you want to know more about this, subscribe to this blog or follow our Twitter account.

Another move: From Xinc to Travis-CI

More or less because of the same reason we have moved from Dokuwiki to Github Wiki, now we want to announce we have change from Xing Continuous Integration server for PHP to Travis-CI.

Reasons are:
- Less time maintaining the CI server (translates to more time working on the product itself)
- Travis-CI integrates smoothly with Github
- Travis-CI is free for open source projects, which is good for us.

From now on you can see the Travis CI status icon in our pages so that at a first glance you know wheter the code is stable or not.

Happy testing!

New Wiki at Github

The old Wiki has been moved to Github so that we have code, issues, and documentation a bit closer.

The previous Dokuwiki based Website was OK but we need save server power for more important purposes, and having a well and free service at Github the decision was quite easy.

See you all there!

Moving to git (and Github)

Long time no see!

We were working with Subversion from the very first day of existence of the project, but in an effort to reach a higher number of developers, along with acquiring new best practices and tools, we have decided to move to git.

From now on the Google Code project page has been marked as deprecated, and each new activity will happen on the Github page.

And I'm not talking only about code changes, Github is the place where we are managing our issue tracking.

Take a look a it, and if you are willing to participate, just drop us a line!