Comparison to Similar Software

Galah was created to be a clone of the Marmoset Project that addressed some fatal shortcomings of the Marmoset project and aimed to exceed it in functionality and scope. Deep into Galah's development, we discovered Web-CAT which is very similar to Galah and Marmoset. Web-CAT is very stable and used at several institutions, however, it too has a few serious drawbacks which Galah is designed to address. In particular, the shortcomings that Galah does not have but Marmoset and/or Web-CAT do are...

• Marmoset is set up to only allow testing of Java code (one institution at least has been able to hack around this to make it work with Scala, but their solution is less than ideal).
• Marmoset's web interface is extremely difficult to navigate.
• Web-CAT only supports having a single server to test student's code and perform all of Web-CAT's other tasks like serving the web interface. This means only one submission can be tested at once and can lead to feedback not becoming available until a couple of hours after submission.
• Web-CAT does not isolate student's code from the rest of the system in an adequate manner (student's code is executed on the same machine as Web-CAT's other processes without any kind of chroot or VM as protection).

These drawbacks were deemed unacceptable for use at UCR (where Galah was conceived) because UCR teaches primarily using C++ (taking Marmoset off the table right off the bat) and Galah is intended to service all of UCR's lower division courses along with online courses, therefore Web-CAT's scalability and security issues were a major concern.

Galah, from the beginning, has aimed to be language agnostic, scalable, secure, easy to use, and simple. Hopefully by keeping these goals in mind Galah will be able to stand out from the alternatives.

(Because Galah is not a finished product, a more complete list of pros and cons of using each of the different software cannot be accurately described, Marmoset does have such a list however here)