Is the course builder been currently updated by google?

[Thomas Lorenzo]

Is the course builder been currently updated by google?

[Rick Casey]

Thomas, 

My understanding is that Google stopped supporting Course Builder back around 2013, when they decided to go with EdX instead. 

I forget where the documentation is about that, but I read a Google press release about it once. 

cheers, 

Rick

[Mike Gainer]

TL;DR: It's available, feature-complete and not being improved as of end of 2016.  Support consists of me answering forum posts if I'm not swamped and am in a reasonably good mood, which is not as frequent a combination as you (or I) might hope for.

It was a little more complicated than that; the EdX merger ended up not happening for a variety of reasons I'm going to be intentionally vague about.  CB itself was supported and in development up through 2016Q4.  At that point, while we knew we had some devoted users, the decision from the EngEdu department was that the staff for CB could better serve Google's interests by working on different internal projects.  At that point, it went into non-maintenance mode.  Which largely meant that we felt it was reasonably complete, didn't have an embarrassing number of bugs, and so while we weren't going to be working on it, there wasn't any harm in just leaving it as a free open-source project.  AFAIK, that's the plan for the indefinite future.  The cloud on the horizon is that Python2 support is going to get end-of-lifed on App Engine at some point, seeing as how Python2 is within weeks of being officially at the end of its service life.  Check for official Google comms to see if there's been a hard deadline announced w.r.t. App Engine and Python2; I am not an official source of truth on that.  We did look briefly at the amount of effort to upgrade to Python3.  While the code itself is probably in decent shape, it is _heavily_ dependent on a number of App Engine APIs that are also going away.

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[Thomas Lorenzo]

Thankyou for your reply. The course builder is an excellent tool that so many other platforms have copied. Regards 

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[Wesley Steuwe]

MIke, 

Any update as to whether course builder will go to Python 3 or not? Couldn't find anything online. 

[Mike Gainer]

Upgrade to Py3 by me[1][2] is pretty much a dead letter[3].  The main showstopper is that CB is so old it's using the "DB" library rather than the NDB library.  There is, I believe, a publicly available backward compatibility layer for the latter but not the former. 

Now, that said, there is also: https://cloud.google.com/python/docs/python2-sunset  The TL;DR on that is that while Google does encourage everybody to get onto Python3, they are not actually dropping your ability to do Py2.  They _are_ dropping any maintenance and upgrades.  But given that CB and Py2 are not changing at all, and are known to play nicely together, you should be able to continue to use CB for ... well, a while.  This section of that doc says "committed to providing long term support".  Even as a Google insider, I don't know what that means for sure - your tea leaf reading may well be superior to mine.

1] Besides myself, I am aware of only three other people still working at Google who also worked on CB.  I'm reasonably sure at this point they will either have or claim to have a rather fuzzy and distant memory of the whole project.  :-> 

2] CB is all open-source, so anybody with deep pockets is welcome to do whatever they like.

3] There is one remaining thing that Google officially produces for external people which still runs on CB, and they are working like mad to get off the platform.

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