Posted by adrian on May 3, 2006 at 9:40pm
Each student has his/her own local work environment (e.g. XAMPP)
43% (3 votes)
A web server is provided on a LAN for students to upload to
14% (1 vote)
A publically-accessible server is provided for students to upload to, and also work remotely from.
43% (3 votes)
Pen and paper ;)
0% (0 votes)
Total votes: 7
Comments
I’m pretty indifferent
I'm pretty indifferent between whether the web server is on the LAN or a publically accessible site, but either way I don't like XAMPP or pen and paper as much as a real thing to touch and feel.
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
XAMPP for simplicity
While I like the idea of a publicly-accessible server as it is the most "realistic" setting, this makes the environment for running the course more complicated (requirement that a network is available, web server configured for remote access, etc.). With XAMPP, you could practically have people turn up with their own laptop and install it there and then, and none of the machines need to be connected to each other. XAMPP is the simplest approach, while remaining relatively close to a "real-life" setup.
personally.
i will be teaching this in a linux lab, with an additional mixture of windows and mac os x laptops.
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The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.
Students should be asked to
Students should be asked to have a working apache & mysql install prior to the course.
To make it easier on people who are not used to dealing with servers, there is both XAMPP for Windows (and Linux although I don't know why you'd use it over the regular system packages), and MAMP for Mac OS X.
I have a little .bat and .sh script that will download, unpack and install the database (databse, user and tables) for a drupal-4.7.0 release. All that is needed after that is to make sure apache knows where to find the drupal files.
For shorter-term courses with multiple instructors it might be more feasible to get the students to go through this pain instead of setting up a shared resource that can only be used for the duration of the course. Once they leave training, they will have a drupal install to play with at home.
Virtual machine lamp stack
Just bumping this with another fairly recent option..
rPath has a service called rBuilder that can create virtual machine images to run in VMWare Player.
Specifically, they have a LAMP Appliance
This could be pre-configured with the version of Drupal used in the training. Then distributed to students to run on their systems inside VMWare Player. They will be able to ssh into it just like a real server, yet they also get to take their working environment home with them.