Thursday, May 12, 2011

Final test period for PL/SQL Challenge version 2

The PL/SQL Challenge development team has been working hard, hard, hard for the last five months (wow, is it that long already?) to create version 2 of the PL/SQL Challenge website. We plan to upgrade PLSQLChallenge.com over the weekend of 21 May; in the meantime, I encourage to visit  test.plsqlchallenge.com to get an early glimpse of the new design and functionality, and give us feedback.

More details on the test program may be found here.

Of course, it's taken a lot longer than I originally planned to put the site "back together." I say that because this version of the Challenge required an extensive refactoring of the table design and supporting code. That was really quite a lot of fun to do, but oh my a very intensive process.

The result is that we have taken a giant step towards transforming the website into a platform for delivering quizzes and tests: essentially, QAAS - "quiz as a service". This means that in the short run we can offer quizzes in a much more flexible manner (and also extend the site to offer quizzes on different technologies, like SQL and APEX). In the longer run, players will be able to set up their own competitions, with their own content.

For example, you could build and offer a series of quizzes to your development team about your own application, best practices, standards, etc. We're not there quite yet, but we are close.

So I hope you find some time to check out the test site; I look forward to your feedback.

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