Introducing CodeFollow

CodeFollow is a tool that allows developers to create interactive code presentations and then share them with large user groups.

How It Works

It's fairly easy to setup a CodeFollow presentation. First, a developer creates an index file that lays out how the order the presentation should be displayed. Each slide can be an external markdown file or just written inline.

A developer can also customize the theme of the presentation by providing their own css file.

index The presentation structure

[title JavaScript Basics]

# allows for custom presentation themes
[theme style.css]

# display a handful of slides using Markdown
[slide introduction.md]
[slide about_javascript.md]
[slide declaring_variables.md]

# executes the test in the 'declaring_variables' directory
[test declaring_variables]

# show the current rankings
[rankings]

# then wrap up
[slide conclusion.md]

Adding Tests

Tests are a little more difficult to create and depends a lot on the language you're using. For example, if youre writing tests for a JavaScript presentation, you use Jasmine style tests.

For example, this was a test for checking if a user declared variables correctly.

// I'm still learning Jasmine, there are probably better
// ways to do some of these thing

describe('variable `a`', function() {
  it('should should exist', function() {
    expect ('a' in window ).toBe( true ); 
  });
  it('it should equal to `3`', function() {
    expect( a === 3 ).toBe( true ); 
  });
});

describe('variable `b`', function() {
  it('it should exist', function() {
    expect ('b' in window ).toBe( true ); 
  });
  it('variable `b` should equal to `false`', function() {
    expect( b === false ).toBe( true ); 
  });
});

describe('variable `c`', function() {
  it('it should exist', function() {
    expect ( 'c' in window ).toBe( true ); 
  });
  it('it should equal to `name`', function() {
    expect( c ).toBe( 'name' ); 
  });  
});

So far, CodeFollow is targeted more towards JavaScript, HTML and CSS testing, but some simple support for Ruby is available (but needs a lot of works still)

What's Next?

I've only used CodeFollow for my own presentations, but I might release it for others to use before long. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me and I'll try my best to answer them.

July 4, 2013