Multimedia web-based programming development environment

Abstract

A web-based environment for C, Java, and Unix shell script programming is described, together with its use in an engineering freshman C programming course. Besides the usual program development facilities such as compiling and debugging, the environment also provides multimedia features for presentation of program output, including audio, interactive graphics, interactive I/O, and HTML forms. The interactive graphics feature plots one or more user-defined functions and includes a graphical implementation of Newton's method for finding a zero given a function and its derivative. The audio feature plays 8 KHz. sampled sound which may be generated by a program directly or by performing signal processing on an input file. The HTML output feature allows students in advanced courses to develop specialized web-based sub- environments. The environment can be customized to provide different prototype files for each subproject of multiple courses and also different files for each student.