Chapter 3. Student Management Portal (SMP)

University and college web portals have always been the fa?ade of an organization to promote their mission and vision, and endorse their academic standards and expertise. Aside from good marketing and external promotion, an academic institution can be labeled "high-end" if all internal transactions, from academic affairs to administration, are automated, which spares faculty and staff from doing redundant tasks.

Management information systems for academic institutions always cover major transactions like online student applications, student management for scores and performance, scheduling, attendance monitoring, and course list development. All these automated transactions are done manually by officers and administrators, which may cause overheads on resources, time and cost.

Many of the school management systems are written in PHP or Ruby Rails, possibly because of the easy syntax these languages exhibit, or the availability of pre-packaged snippets online available for instant use.

This chapter will discuss how to start a student management portal that caters for the same administration, academic and student modules, but uses the systematic organized techniques of the Spring 4 specification. This chapter needs a grounding in the topics in Chapter 1, Creating a Personal Web Portal (PWP) and some of the components in Chapter 2, Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS), but new concepts will be introduced which are appropriate for developing SMPs from the ground up. As seen from the previous chapters, the price of building Spring MVC applications is not only for the sake of the the new knowledge you acquire, but also for the maintainability and the manageability of codes after project delivery.

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

• Use relational database management system for Spring applications
• Implement DAO and services layers
• Use Spring Framework JDBC abstraction
• Use Hibernate 4.x Framework
• Use MyBatis 3.x Framework
• Implement audit trails and logging using AOP