Road Map of PASS
PASS was first conceived in 2003. A prototype version was initially built for demonstration purposes in early 2004. The feedback was very positive. As such, it was soon re-engineered and extensively tested before being deployed into production use commencing the fall semester of 2004.
In September 2004, PASS was first adopted in a computer programming course to automate the submission of programming assignments as well as the marking of correctness of the student programs.
In May 2005, PASS was substantially improved to its Version 2 (V2). PASS V2 was adopted in four computer programming courses. More than 600 students utilized PASS to do a total of 80 lab exercises and 8 programming assignments. Over 3000 program submissions and 20000 test executions have been handled by PASS.
A major upgrade was performed, and PASS Version 3.0 (V3) was released in September 2006. The application environment was changed to use JBoss as the application server and Apache Strut as the framework of the application. The Database Server was also changed to MySQL. To strengthen the security of the system, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol was used. Java and Microsoft C++ .NET compilers were added into PASS. Student performance statistics were provided for monitoring by instructors.
Minor enhancements to PASS were made from time to time. By September 2008, the maintenance work of PASS was taken over by staff of the Computer Science Lab (CS Lab), Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong.
