A project to reimplement Hedtek’s Manchester PLE system using Ruby on Rails and a disciplined, BDD and Automated Acceptence Test First approach. This project is being carried out as a Master’s level project by a team of 7 students, under the guidance of Hedtek.

The aims of the project are to not only reimplement the existing PLE in terms of features, but also to carry out research into interesting areas, such as the use of hybrid NoSQL systems, integration into other systems, mobile support, much more sophisticated searching and findability, good methods of graceful UI degredation and extension, and research into the process itself.

Heavy automation is a key part of the project, with the plan being to start with completely automated tests both on the developer machines and on a continuous integration server, and also to automate the deployment of the system, and automate the setup of the system’s environment, using Capistrano and Chef respectively