Quiz

I'm looking for some advice from those who know more about Quiz on the best way to approach developing a new question plug-in. I'm working with someone in computational linguistics to create a question type that will mark formative questions to which the answer is a phrase or a sentence or two of free text. As a first step, marking logic will be held on the server so I don't need to worry about the authoring side of things (yet), apart from the question prompt, just the marking. We'll use some sort of UUID to tell the server which question to mark e.g I'll post:

{  
   "q_id":1234567890,
    "answer":"The first thing to do is to investigate hemispheric lateralisation",
}

 

to which I'd get a response something like:

{
  "answer": "The first thing to do is to investigate hemispheric lateralisation",
  "justification": [
    "investigate hemispheric lateralisation "
  ],
  "mark": 1,
  "q_id": 1234567890
}

Given my complete lack of knowledge of Moodle and YUI (although I am a PHP/JQuery/Angular 2 developer), I'd be very grateful for any steers on how best to approach this. 

Long-term, I'm hoping to be able to author the questions in Moodle as well. The marking syntax would be stored as text but I wouldn't want to expose users to this so would create some sort of authoring interface which would graphically represent the marking logic as far as possible and would again be calling third-party services to suggest synonyms, etc.

I see that there is an Opaque question type which would work if I was prepared to write my own question rendering engine but I'm keen to keep as much as possible within Moodle - is this mad? 

Is anyone aware of any question plugins that have attempted to delegate only marking to a third-party service? 

Am I going to have to get to grips with YUI or is there some way I can use JQuery to make requests and and handle responses?

Thanks

Damion