baseimage-tutorial-framework/README.md

# baseimage-tutorial-framework

This is the beating heart of TFW – the Docker baseimage containing the internals of the framework.

All tutorial-framework challenges are child images of this one: their `Dockerfile`s all begin with `FROM avatao/tutorial-framework`.

This document explains the general concepts of TFW and should be the first thing you read before getting started with development.

For more on building and running you should consult the `test-tutorial-framework` repo.

## The framework

The goal of the tutorial-framework is to help content developers in creating interactive tutorials for the Avatao platform.

To make this possible TFW implements a robust messaging system and provides several pre-written components built upon it, such as a file editor or a terminal (running in your browser).

The foundation of the whole framework is the messaging system connecting the frontend with the backend.
Frontend components use websockets to connect to TFW, which you can hook to several *event handlers* to define ways to handle specific messages.

![TFW architecture](docs/tfw_architecture.png)

Note that our reference frontend implementation is written in Angular (`frontend-tutorial-framework` repository).
Most of pre-made `EventHandler`s are writen in Python3, but you can write event handlers in any language that has ZeroMQ bindings (this virtually means any language).