Optersoft Academy

For the classroom

The programs a course assumes

A lesson cannot start until every machine in the room is the same one and every student has the same tools. Oxid is what the web material is written in; box and the Kotlin extension are small, free, and written for our own classrooms before anyone else's.

• Oxid

  Full web applications in pure Python. No JavaScript, no bundler, no node_modules.

  oxid.optersoft.com

  • Python
  • Rust
  • WebAssembly

  The constraint

  A team that knows Python should not need a second language, a Node toolchain and a bundler to put an interface in a browser — and every one of those is one more thing a student has to learn before writing the first useful page.

  What we built

  A fine-grained reactive framework, and underneath it a Python runtime of our own: a bytecode virtual machine written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly, with the reactive core as native types inside it — and, on the same runtime, the server that renders each page per request. Prerendering writes each route as finished HTML and the browser hydrates it, so a page with nothing interactive on it downloads no runtime at all.

  What it does for us

  It is what our web applications are written in and what Academy teaches web development with; the site you are reading is built with it, and not one of its pages fetches a line of JavaScript. Apache 2.0, on PyPI — pip install oxid is the whole install. It was called Frontage until October 2026.

• box

  Linux machines on a Windows laptop, from one command or from a desktop app.

  box.optersoft.com

  • Rust
  • WSL2
  • gpui

  The constraint

  A course needs more than one Linux machine per student — a server and a client, a network between them, one to break and one to rebuild — on Windows laptops we do not administer, and without a student having to remember a single wsl --import argument.

  What we built

  box makes a Linux machine from a distribution's official WSL image, provisions it — a user with passwordless sudo, the student's SSH key, the hostname — and opens a shell in it. One flat list of commands for the whole life of a machine, from create to compact to delete, and a desktop application beside it for the students who would rather click than type.

  What it does for us

  It is the machine under Academy's Linux, networking and systems material. Free to download, for Windows; it ships as a binary rather than as source.

• Kotlin Toolchain for VS Code

  JetBrains' Kotlin Toolchain in VS Code — module.yaml projects that resolve, on any machine.

  kotlin.optersoft.com

  • Kotlin
  • Rust
  • VS Code
  • Language server

  The constraint

  JetBrains builds the Kotlin Toolchain for IntelliJ IDEA and for nowhere else: the official Kotlin language server imports Gradle, Maven and Bazel projects, but not the toolchain's own module.yaml. And a classroom of eight-year-old machines cannot afford a heavy IDE, where every second of the edit-run loop counts.

  What we built

  A VS Code extension and the language server it bundles, written in Rust: completion, hover, go to definition, find all references and rename across a project, the toolchain's tasks from the editor, run on save and a new-project command. The parser, outline and formatter need no build at all, so the editor is useful the moment a file opens.

  What it does for us

  It is the editor under Academy's Kotlin material, and the guide there says what it can give you, what it cannot, and where the seconds go. Free to use, on the VS Code Marketplace, documented at kotlin.optersoft.com.