Intended Uses
Bride of Frankensystem (BOF or BOFS) is intended to be used by developers to deploy custom-developed experiments online. It provides a variety of solutions to common problems associated with online experiments while being easily extended in a way that minimizes code duplication and encourages code reuse. Its design focuses on flexibility rather than providing concrete solutions to every scenario, and so is targeted primarily towards software developers while still being accessible for non-developers for many simple use-cases.
BOF is built using Flask and is intended to be used as a Python library. Because it is built with Flask, all Flask extensions and features are supported, and it is relatively straightforward to extend the project with your own custom web pages and tasks.
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Features
BOF includes a number of features relating to deploying online experiments
- Built-in consent page in which the text can be easily configured.
- Automatic random assignment of participants to various conditions.
- Define the experiment's flow in terms of URLs.
- Define questionnaires using a custom JSON structure.
- Create your own custom web pages (using Python and Flask) to embed custom tasks.
- Easily embed your own custom instructional pages without writing Python code.
- Admin panel to track participants' progress and export data.
Dependencies
BOF requires Python 3.9+, along with the following Python packages.
flask- The web framework that BOF is based off of.sqlalchemy- An object-relational manager that is used for database table definitions and query access.flask-sqlalchemy- A bridge between Flask and SQLAlchemy.flask-compressed- To support the compressed files that Unity WebGL builds use.eventlet- This is used as the production (live) web server, as an alternative to Flask's built in web server or the Apache web server.toml- The configuration files use the toml format.crawlerdetect- To detect web crawlers so that they don't get counted as actual participants.pandas- Used to process data for the export and for the results preview.
Installing and Running BOFS
Please refer to the installation instructions in the documentation.