The Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) is an activity module for RWTHmoodle that manages programming tasks. Its main features are:

•     Processing of program source code in the browser (in many programming languages also with debugger).
•     Students can interactively execute the programs they've created in the browser. The code is executed on a secure, RWTH-owned execution server.
•     Managers can define test runs and students can execute them to automatically check the correctness of the created programs.
•     Allows lecturers to search for similarities between files (plagiarism detection).
•     Allows to set editing restrictions and avoid external text insertion.

RWTHmoodle currently supports the following programming languages:

•     Ada
•     C
•     C++
•     C#
•     Fortran
•     Haskell
•     Java
•     Matlab/Octave
•     Pascal
•     Perl
•     PHP
•     Prologue
•     Python
•     Ruby
•     Scheme
•     SQL
•     VHDL

Please note: The IT Center of RWTH Aachen runs the servers on the Linux distribution CentOS. Unfortunately, there are no graph functions available for Matlab/Octave and other applications.

Features

VPL provides the usual features of activities such as grading, groups, role-based access control, access logs, data backup and recovery, etc. It also has a variety of features tailored to programming tasks.

1. Delivery control

VPL offers several ways to control submissions:

•     Limiting the submission time and access to the task.
•     Specifying the maximum number of files that can be uploaded.
•     Specifying the maximum size of each uploaded file.
•     Specifying the names and number of files to be uploaded.
•     Browsing, editing and uploading files may be restricted to networks and/or password protected.

2. File management

•     Edit code in the browser with a built-in IDE.
•     Files can contain a given code construct.
•     Uploaded files are displayed with syntax highlighting.

3. Execution and evaluation of submissions

•     Standard execution and debug scripts for many programming languages.
•     Scripts and programs can be set to evaluate each submission.
•     Programs can be executed with input/output in a text console.
•     To control program execution, resources can be limited by time, memory size, file size, and the number of processes.

4. Control of authorship (plagiarism detection)

•     Allows you to browse the submissions for similar files.
•     The system can add watermarks to the downloaded code.
•     Allows you to restrict editing and prevent external code from being inserted.