During my 4th semester in 2022 at the Moulay Ismail University in Morocco, each one of the student was tasked with creating a specific JEE web application. I was tasked with creating a webapp that would manage the evaluation / grading process of a university. This webapp was to be complete and handles all the different components that are required for the evaluation process, i.e. students, teachers, administrators, courses, modules, semesters, registrations, marks, etc...
You can read the specification booklet that was given to me here. However, it is in French.
I was pretty excited to work on this project, as that it represented a real challenge. It was a relatively big scale project, and we had to learning about the new technology (JEE) as to adhere to the specifications, all in the duration of around 5 months, while still having other modules to juggle. This is what our time table looked like that semester.
I first took some good time reading and understanding the specifications. Then I designed the class diagram of the project, which you can see here. Then I started learning JEE, namely off of this book. It helped quite a lot as that it was comprehensive. But that alone took me around 2 months, and was yet to write a single line of code. Here is the Gantt chart if you want to see how the work ended up being divided, although it is in French again.
Seeing that I was very short in time, and that I still literally had the whole project to implement, I started coding like I have never coded in my entire life. I was coding non-stop everyday, from the moment I woke up, until the moment I went to bed. I hated it. I was exhausted and tired. But I wanted it to be done, and I wanted it to be operational and good, and actually usable, and not just presentation-usable. Thankfully, I was able to do so, and really just in the nick of time. I coded and implemented the last component of the webapp the evening before the presentation day. And then pulled an all-nighter to write the report.
I learned quite a bit from this experience, and aside from the new technologies and whatnot, I also learned something very important, which is prioritizing my self and my health, and not neglecting my self and everything for a school project. I learned that I should've said
Fuck that shit, if we don't finish it, we don't finish it.
and take a couple of breaks and take care of my self.
Never the less, good experience, would recommend. 👍🏼
The style wasn't a top priority but I didn't want the website to be hideous neither. Worth noting is that I only knew HTML, CSS, and JS at the time, and that I did everything my self, no template, no nothing. Also, the bulk of the application was the administrator part, so that's where most of the snippets are from.
Those little majors icons circled and floated around the logo.
A student can apply to join the program from this page.
When an admin logged in, this is what he was presented with. I was proud of the little menu on the side that can be closed. 😊
The admin can manage the academic years from this page.
The admin can manage the modules from this page.
Each module had elements.
And then each element had assessments, like exams or homework.
A pedagogical registration is when a student registers to a module.
The admin can manage the different account types from this page.
He can assign instructors to modules here.
The admin can approve the marks that the instructors have entered, and thus "seal" them so that they can't be modified.
Here the admin can download the marks either of a module, a semester, or for the whole year.
Here is an example of the downloaded marks table.
When a student logs in, this is what he was presented with.
And this is where he could see his marks.
There are a lot more pages and functionalities, but those are some snippets of the UI / UX.
The project was originally developed in Eclipse integrated JEE environment, where it handles deployment and everything. But I turned it into a Maven project before uploading it here.
The project obviously requires a database, and a MySql database was used. So to run the project you first need to create a database in your MySql server (just locally). And then run this script to create the tables.
An empty database isn't that useful, so here are some simple dummy data that you can insert.
After doing that, you also need to configure the persistence unit in this persistence.xml file, so that the application would know which database to use, and with which user to log into it.
Once the database is ready and the MySql server is running, simply package the project using Maven, and deploy the generated .war file to your Servlet container.
You can package the project by running this command in the project's root directory:
mvn clean packageThat would generate a .war file in the target directory, which you then deploy to your Servlet container. I tested it with Apache Tomcat 10.0.17, but it should work with any other container.
In addition to the basic dummy date available in the basic_dummy_data.sql file, there is also a couple more that you can find in this the db_scripts directory. As well as some excel dummy data in the excel_dummy_data directory.
While working on this project, I noticed that I was doing a lot of repetitive tasks, and that many things could be automated and made a lot easier when working with JEE. That inspired me to make Jeext. A collection of tools that made working with JEE a bit more barrable.
I originally developed these tools and functionalities in conjunction with this project / inside it. After finishing the project however, I took them out and made them into a separate project, added a lot more functionalities and kept working on it.
But anyhow, I would not recommend using Jeext as that I abandoned the project eventually, and you should use something like Spring instead.