As an education technology company, we strive to make student outcomes better through the best use of technology. To support this, our service has developed constantly over 12 years to adjust to changing student needs and we are always striving to do more. That's why today we release a new online classroom, built from the ground up.
Studiosity was previously called 'YourTutor', this is what the online classroom looked like in 2015
We have developed this new classroom in-house by making use of the technology that is in each modern web browser, HTML5. To make use of this we use a framework called Ember.js. Ember touts itself as a "framework for creating ambitious web applications" and that is exactly what we need.
When looking at the options for redeveloping this crucial part of our software stack we explored a few different options including React with Backbone.js and Meteor but settled on using Ember.js. for a few reasons.
1. Strong opinions and conventions
As Studiosity's javascript codebase grows and its complexity increases adding new features and on-boarding new developers becomes increasingly difficult. Having a framework with well-researched and documented idioms reduces the barrier to entry while also leveraging the shared experiences of the emberJs community.
2. Stability without stagnation
The core team behind EmberJs have worked hard to craft a development process that makes new releases frequent and nonintrusive. This pace helps developers keep their EmberJs application up to date while continually releasing new features.
3. Always learning
EmberJs is just one of many great frameworks that exists today and its willingness to learn from the other major projects is a huge advantage. For instance, EmberJs recently released a new rendering engine called glimmer, inspired by ReactJs which gained popularity in the javascript community due to its performance improvements.
We are planning to continue to add new features and improvements to the classroom experience so it helps students and Subject Specialists engage as effortlessly as possible.
We hope you enjoy the new classroom experience and we invite you to leave your thoughts and suggestions below.
Studiosity is an online study help service, connecting Australia's best and brightest educators to students during homework time. Sign up now to see how it works.
