Hello all! Axim Collaborative is pleased to announce a new funded contribution project to help advance the Open edX platform.
This project aims to simplify our infrastructure for remotely hosted code graders and reduce our overall maintenance burden. We are seeking proposals from existing community members as well as qualified organizations looking for a first project to join the community. All proposals from providers interested in undertaking this work must be submitted by 10/23/2024 and Axim expects to choose a provider by 10/31/2024.
A primary goal of this project is to adapt our code grading infrastructure so that the XQueue repository can be deprecated and removed. XQueue is a primitive queuing system developed in 2012 without significant further investment since that time.
However, the code grading capabilities of the platform are currently used by the community. So, we would like an approach that minimizes disruption to existing users and is ideally completely backward compatible. Details about configuration of the XQueue are available in the documentation.
This work represents a change to the approach initially described in this DEPR ticket. We do plan to deprecate and remove xqueue, but not xqueue-watcher.
Submitted proposals should include technical discovery and may offer any approach that meets the need, reduces complexity, and minimizes maintenance costs.
A possible approach would be to leverage the existing message bus implementation for the platform. This approach would update the client code in the edx-platform to push gradable code assignments onto the message bus, and update the client, xqueue-watcher, to read from the message bus rather than the xqueue.
The approach should allow someone who is using XQueue today to continue to do so, though that repository will be deprecated and removed from the project.
