meonkeys/turkserver-meteor

Framework for building online, real-time user experiments in Meteor

turkserver-meteor

TurkServer is a package for building interactive web-based user experiments on the Meteor web app framework. It uses Meteor's powerful publish/subscribe data model and reactivity to make designing experimental interfaces a piece of cake while providing many automatic facilities for deploying your app and collecting data.

The Meteor version of TurkServer was based on the original Java-based TurkServer. However, it's much more powerful and easier to use.

Features

• Design interfaces using the power of Meteor and just add TurkServer to get an experiment.
• Multi-user, interactive experiments are just as easy to build as single-user experiments.
• Highly configurable randomization of treatments and
• Graphical admin interface for deploying experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
• Watch the progress of experiments in real time.
• Live log viewing of data generated in each experiment.

Quick Start

The following are instructions for Meteor 0.9 or later:

1. Install Meteor: curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh

2. Create a Meteor app: meteor create my_experiment

3. Go to this directory: cd my_experiment

4. Install TurkServer locally (once we publish TurkServer to the Meteor packaging server, you will be able to omit this step):

   git clone --recursive https://github.com/HarvardEconCS/turkserver-meteor.git packages/mizzao:turkserver
   

5. meteor add mizzao:turkserver to install the package and its dependencies.

6. Start your app with the meteor command.

7. Navigate to /turkserver to log into the administration interface, and develop your experiment!

8. ???

9. Deploy your experiment on free Meteor hosting and use real subjects on MTurk:

   meteor deploy my_experiment.meteor.com
   

For more information, check out the documentation.

Examples

NOTE: TurkServer is currently still in development, but for those who are itching to try it out, feel free to reference https://github.com/mizzao/CrowdMapper as a full-fledged, working experiment.

See TurkServer#3 for more info. More examples and documentation will be coming soon.

Testing

Clone this entire repository, including the submodules. For example:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/HarvardEconCS/turkserver-meteor.git turkserver

Then run the tests:

cd turkserver
meteor test-packages ./

If you checked out the repository into an existing Meteor app, you can run meteor test-packages turkserver from your app instead.

Browse to http://localhost:3000 to run the tests.

You don't have to run the tests yourself; this project is set up for continuous integration on Travis CI, which runs these tests on each commit.