Small webapp to provide a anonymous feedback form for students to rate their TAs. Its an all to common problem for students to not know their TA by name nor their email. Our platform uses the course code and section to help find the TA students had.
The application has two principal components: a PostgreSQL database backend,
and a Tornado application server. Before the application server will run, it
needs to establish a connection to the Postgres instance (via dbconn.py).
Database configuration details are stored in a file called dbconn.toml, which
should be placed in the top level of the application (alongside backend.py). A
template TOML file is available as dbconn.example.toml; simply copy it to
dbconn.toml and update it with the Postgres credentials for the app.
After loading this data into the configuration file, the database must be
boostrapped. A bootstrapping script is available in db_setup.sql; this file
may be loaded into Postgres using the following command:
# verbosely
$ psql some_database -U some_user -a -f db_setup.sql --password
# non-verbosely
$ psql some_database -U some_user -f db_setup.sql --password
Once this step is complete, test data may be loaded into the database from
db_test_data.sql in the same way.
By default, the application exposes a REST API on HTTP port 8888 and requires no special privileges.
It can be accessed using a browser on the same port.
The application requires Python 2, and specifically has been tested with Python 2.7. While it does not outright crash under Python 3, its correct performance is not guaranteed, as only minimal testing has been carried out using Python 3.
Exact PyPI package requirements are stored in requirements.txt, and can be
installed beforehand using pip2 install -r requirements.txt. Currently, these
requirements include:
tornado==4.4.2pg8000==1.10.6toml==0.9.2slog==0.9.0