Stress testing JATOS with Pumba

Pumba is a chaos testing command line tool for Docker containers. Pumba disturbs your containers by crashing containerized application, emulating network failures and stress-testing container resources (cpu, memory, fs, io, and others).

Read More

Simple setup of a JATOS server with DigitalOcean and Traefik

JATOS greatly simplifies setting up a server to run studies online but you still need that server to begin with! If getting your own server (e.g. from your IT department) is not an option, you can set up JATOS on a cloud vendor (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud are the most common ones).

Read More

Use Google Slides in a JATOS study

There is a really easy way to embed Google Slides in your JATOS component’s HTML file. I thought that this might be a quick way to write the instructions for an experiment. They aren’t the most beautiful way to present instructions (the Google Slides frame is always visible) but it’s quick, easy, versatile, and allows your participants to move forwards and backwards on the series of instructions slides.

Read More

p5.js for easy 2D and 3D graphics and more

Since JATOS doesn’t limit what actually runs in the browser during your studies you can use all kinds of JavaScript libraries and frameworks with it. This is not possible if you use e.g. Qualtrics. One of those libraries is p5.js. p5.js lets you do otherwise complicated 2D or 3D graphics in an easy way. Have a look at the examples on the p5.js webpage to get an idea of what is possible.

Read More

SurveyJS for those standard forms

Doing user input forms, e.g. for questionaires or surveys in the browser yourself often means handling a lot of <input>, <textarea>, CSS etc. Those can be quite cumbersome. One wants to concentrate on the actual survey and does not want to count radiobuttons or the pixels of the border of input fields. Therefore usually one uses a library that helps with this process. So far there where mostly jQuery UI and Bootstrap. Alpaca also does the job but I found it a bit difficult to use (although I only tried for one afternoon). Now there is a new option: SurveyJS (or survey.js - both spellings seem to be used).

Read More

JATOS Introduction Videos

We noticed that can be difficult for people who have never heard of JATOS to understand what JATOS actually is and what it can do for them. So we started with a little series of introduction videos. We planned 3 parts so far. First one is youtu.be/H1tR8gPt6bA. I hope you like it (I’m a programmer and not an entertainer - so please be gentle with me).

Read More

How much memory does JATOS need?

This post is about how much memory JATOS needs for a single user. If you intend to set up JATOS for several user (e.g. for an institute) JATOS needs more memory. The same is true for an experiment with many or large result data.

Read More