Release Notes

Release 0.5.5 (021/02/12

Rolls up the latest versions of RP templates, including CC templates. See the dev version of MathAssessEngine for all other recent schema/spec updates.

Release 0.5.4 (05/04/11)

This release rolls up the new features added last August to support the latest draft of the QTI Main Profile, as well as some minor bug fixes. Development is now about to ramp up again in the context of a new JISC project.

• Implemented the new infoControl element.
• Added support for the new countAttempt="false" attribute on endAttemptInteraction.
• Added support for the suggested caseSensitive="false" attribute on mapEntry. This is only permitted for string baseTypes; a validation error will be reported otherwise.
• Our fork of the JQTI library now expands entity references. Some potentially incorrect XML parsing methods have been refactored into safer equivalents.
• Fixed parsing of Maxima MathML to handle Greek letters correctly.
• Fixed code in the engine that compensated for the JQTI parsing issue that was fixed in 0.5.3. This had been over-compensating since the fix to JQTI, introducing a separate bug!

Release 0.5.3 (28/06/10)

• Content Package handling now handles Common Catridge QTI 2.1 Assessment packages.
• Our fork of the JQTI library now handles XML without pre-espacing entities, character references and CDATA sections so should now no longer suffer from issues arising from this design feature.
• Fixed bug in the display of <modalFeedback> blocks in tests.
• Fixed bug in the rendering of <inlineChoiceInteraction>.
• Fixed bug introduced in 0.5.0 that caused items and tests not to be validated by default.
• Fixed bug calculating the pagination of built-in articles, which caused too many pages to appear.
• Minor updates to software dependencies.

Release 0.5.2 (08/06/10)

Minor bug-fix release that tightens up the match for IDs in controller URL mappings.

Release 0.5.1 (30/04/10)

Final FETLAR roll-up release, including a minor new feature and some UI tweaks.

• The /application/upload action now supports passing a URL, either via an explicit url parameter or as path info. The engine will then attempt to load a resource from the given URL and play it, if of the appropriate format.
• Error page tidied up a little to be less scary. Details and stack trace are now hidden when first displayed.

Release 0.5.0 (23/04/10)

As predicted, this is a minor update to 0.4.0 that fixes a few bugs. It also adds in a few missing features that integrators might find useful.

• Added an explicit 'exit' action to the ArticleController, as well as a 'delete'. Articles have to be marked as 'deletable' in order for the delete action to succeed.
• The 'astest' parameter has been renamed as 'asTest' for consistency with other parameters. (The old parameter is still accepted as a fallback, for backward compatibility.)
• Item and test resources are now served via a URL-mapped 'resource' action of ActionController, and resources have moved into WEB-INF so that they cannot be easily browsed. Test and item source resources now can no longer be served in this fashion, though are still accessible via the 'source' action.
• Added a selection of new rendering parameters for finer-grained control over rendering, replacing the need for the old 'playrMode' parameter.
• Added simple access control mechanism to prevent certain actions from being called. This for example could prevent serving up sources, if required.
• Added ability to set default rendering parameters for the engine, and to control whether they may be tweaked via HTTP parameters or not.
• Change name of internal record variable field identifing Maths Content variables to be consistent with the final version of the MathAssess spec.

Release 0.4.0 (09/04/10)

This is the final release as part of the FETLAR project (modulo bug-fixes).

• Items are no longer reinitialised when revisited during a test, alllowing randomised variables to be correctly preserved.
• Fixed bug in JQTI concerning the management of the completionStatus variable.
• Added some extra parameters to tweak the rendering process, which might be useful for people looking to embed the engine in trivial ways.
Fixed long-standing issue concerning storage of non-serializable Objects in the HTTP session.
• Error page now looks slightly less scary than before.
• Temporarily removed 'Math Input Help' icon as we don't actually have any useful text to use here yet...!
• Minor tweaks and improvements to the WAR build process and logging configuration. (NB: Rolling file appender added to 0.3.3 has been removed so as to ensure platform independence.)

Release 0.3.3 (31/03/10)

• Default Test rendering now follows same layout as Item rendering, making it easier to debug tests. State information now also shows test outcome variables.
• Fixed bug in test rendering that was preventing Test Outcome Variables from being substituted in the appropriate places.
• Added support for substituting Test Outcome Variables inside MathML in the same way, following our existing extensions to the spec.
• Fixed link for exiting tests.
• Some other minor internal fixes.
• Added extra "rolling file appender" to webapp logging config, so that people running standalone engines can get at logging information somehow. (For platform independence, I didn't specify a full path here, so people running their own (e.g. embedded) engines will live with whereever the log file goes.)

Release 0.3.2 (19/03/10)

• Uses latest Jacomax 0.2 snapshot, using the new SimpleMaximaConfigurator to configure Maxima first by looking for jacomax.properties, then looking for Maxima in obvious places. If no Maxima configuration is found, the engine will still run, albeit without support for MathAssess extensions.
• Non-XML annotations are now stripped out of MathML during rendering.

Release 0.3.1 (11/03/10)

• Incorporates fix to JQTI so that outcome variables are now reset at the start of response processing (for non-adaptive items).
• Added new samples questions from Sue. (These are still being worked on...)
• Improved logging to make it easy to debug things that veer off the happy path.

Release 0.3.0 (08/03/10)

• This release uses the newly rewritten Java to Maxima connector code, as well as updated glue code containing new functionality for pooling Maxima processes.
• Most of the temporary nasty singletones added in 0.2.1 have been removed and replaced with Spring beans. The only exception is the former MathAssess module, which will continue to need a little bit of trickery due to the way its classes are instantiated at runtime.

Release 0.2.2 (03/03/10)

• Updated the MAD02-SRnoRand.xml sample question so that it works correctly.
• Minor fixes and improvments to the XHTML+MathML generated by the engine to make it more valid. (Not 'strict' valid yet due to use of some 'transitional' features.)

Release 0.2.1 (26/02/10)

• Added lifecycle methods to JQTI to enable the engine to determine the start and end of initialisation and response processing. This means we can keep a single Maxima session running during processing, greatly increasing performance.
• XSLT stylesheets are now cached after creation, hopefully increasing performance again.
• Added parameter for generating output suitable for displaying in playr.
• Added parameter allowing client to specify explicit serialization method required, which is useful for playr.
• Various other bug fixes and improvements.

Release 0.2.0 (12/02/10)

First notional release of working code... sort of!