It's interesting to see how much "overhead" static typing and language verbosity generates. But maybe there are also ways to write it more compact in Java, not sure.
At http://codeboard.io we use them to compile and execute the user-written programs.
I guess that's not the typical use of Docker because there are a number of security concerns. We do a number of things to mitigate those but isolation is not as good as with a full VM.
However, containers are so fast that we can create -> execute -> destroy containers for every single "compile" and "run" action.
Another big advantage, imho, is the Docker Remote API [1] which makes it very easy to integrate Docker in your app.
I really like the simplicity of the problem templates. And you have a nice collection there. May I ask how you displayed them to students, how students submitted their solutions and how you ran their code?
So far, we haven't focused very much on providing content (i.e. exercises) ourselves because Codeboard is mostly used to complement existing courses where the teachers already have content and exercises in mind. Codeboard just makes it much easier for them to handle submissions or e.g. integrate with an existing Moodle or edX infrastructure.
Using reference implementations - rather than tests - and having a simple way to provide hints (as you do in your templates) are features we're quite interested in. We did a bit of work on the latter recently but that stuff hasn't made it into Codeboard yet.
I'll forward your repo to some of my colleagues. Thanks again.
To the best of my knowledge, however, none of these projects have found any widespread adaption. A lot of it also has to do - I think - with culture and personal preference.
What are common use cases for client-side permissions, given you can't be sure the code won't be tampered with? I could think of adapting the UI based on roles: it's nice to have but not critical. What else?