Although not originally planned, today we’ve released an intermediate version of peach³. There have been several important changes and fixes to warrant this new release. Most changes are related to the course management functionality.
For a full list of changes, see the changelog on trac.
The new release can be downloaded from the peach³ download page.
Thierry Schellenbach from YouTellMe.nl recently wrote on his blog that their site is probably the largest Django project in terms of codebase. Since their project isn’t open-source, it’s hard to tell if that claim is true or not.
But it got me wondering. What is the largest open-source Django-based project around?
Today we released the first “packaged” version of peach³, version 1.0-beta3.
The mercurial repository was already open for anyone interested in our project, but most people like a packaged version over a repository. Also installation documentation was lacking.
Managers like numbers. Source Lines of Code (SLoC) is such a number. Today I counted the number of sourcelines written by me for peach³.
The peach³ repository is now open for anyone interested in the project.
I still have to write installation documentation, but as it is a Django project, the installation instructions over at the djangoproject.com site also apply to peach³. Once the current version has been tested to be stable (by a couple of hundred first-year students 
) a downloadable packaged version will be released.
The peach³ public demo is now available at http://demo.peach3.nl/
Registration is open for everyone. Please read the Terms of Use before using the system.
In Olympiads in Informatics, 2008 vol. 2, an article was published on “Programming Task Packages: Peach Exchange Format“
We started with the first version of peach (then called PEACH/vs) in early 2001. The basic idea was to create a simple website where our students could upload their programming homework assignments.
We got the idea from software that was used for programming contests, specifically PC². This is a Java application used by the ACM programming contest (which we hosted in 1999, and therefor had some experience with it) where contestants would supply their solution to some programming problem and a jury would (manually) evaluate the quality of the submission.