WAD

Web application for managing the indicators of the research

activity in a university department

1. 1 Description of the project theme

• The goal is to create a web application for managing the indicators of the research activity in a university department.

• These indicators may be:• research projects• publications (articles, books etc)• software products• organized conferences• awards obtained by academic staff or students

• The application should store information about the research activity and generate appropriate reports and statistics.

1. 2 Motivation of the project theme

• It is a useful application • It can be used by any university department

(also for the software department from our university)

• It is a complex application and, because of that we have learned a lot of useful methods and technologies (the most interesting part is making a raport in a pdf format)

2.1 Theoretical aspects regarding the technologies (1)

• 1. JSP • JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology enables Web

developers and designers to rapidly develop and easily maintain, information-rich, dynamic Web pages that leverage existing business systems

• 2. HTML:• HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language,

is the predominant markup language for web pages • 3. CSS• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet

language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language

2.1 Theoretical aspects regarding the technologies (2)

• 4. MySQL (JDBC)• JDBC technology is an API (included in both J2SE and

J2EE) that provides cross-DBMS connectivity to a wide range of SQL databases and access to other tabular data sources, such as spreadsheets or flat files.

• MySQL is a relational database management system that has more than 11 million installations

• 5. iText• iText is a free and open source library for creating and

manipulating PDF files in Java. • 6. JavaScript• JavaScript is implemented as an integrated component

of the web browser, allowing the development of enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites.

2. 2 Motivation of choosing those technologies:

• We have used JSP in order to implement dynamic pages easily and in a short period of time.

• HTML and CSS are used in order to realize the interface of the application. We’ve used a template, but we made the corresponding changes

• We’ve used JDBC technology because it provides the connection with the SQL database and MySQL because is the world's most popular open source database software.

• We’ve used itext.jar in order to save a raport in a pdf format.

3. 1 General structure/architecture of the

application(1)• Our application is formed of a considerable

number of .jsp files, has some html files and 2 CSS files that are used for the interface, a database and .js files .

• In order to understand the structure of our application, one should examine carefully the next diagram.

3.1 General structure/architecture of the application(3)

• All the names represent the names of the .jsp files of our application.

• The diagram presents the files accessed by the administrator in order to perform different actions.

• Index represent the main file of the application(corresponding to the main page of the application).

• In the figure there are 3 different kind of squares, corresponding to different types of files:– the home page (start file of the application)– the .jsp files that are viewed by the users (contain an interface)– the files that realize the connection with the database

• The red bordered squares represent the pages that can be accessed from each point of the application. (For example, from mesaj the user can access the red squares)

3. 2 General structure/architecture of the

database• We have created a database with 10 tables. • The tables Book_Authors, Conf_paper_Authors,

Journal_Paper_Authors and Chapters_Authors are used in order to realize the relation many to many between Books, Conference_Paper, Chapters, Jounal_Paper respectively and Users.

• Also, there is a relation 1 to many between Users and Projects.

4. Implementation details

• In our opinion, the most interesting part in the fact that we can save a raport in a .pdf file. In order to do that, we have used iText, that is a free and open source library for creating and manipulating PDF files in Java.

• Other interesting piece of code is the JavaScript for dynamically adding another author.

• It was also interesting creating a small search engine for our project. We tried to make it as optimal as possible, and we think that we did a good job

5. User manual (1)

• Because we made this application only for the admin, before starting it the administrator must login.

5. User manual (2)• If your user and password are correct, the Home

Page appears:

If not, it will appear:

5. User manual (3)

• From now on, the admin has the right to make a lot of actions:– 1. has the possibility to change the password– 2. browse items (conference paper, journal paper,

project, book, book chapter)– 3. search items (conference paper, journal paper,

project, book, book chapter)– 4. add items (conference paper, journal paper,

project, book, book chapter)– 5. modify or delete items– 6. make a raport– 7. finally, logout

5. User manual (4)

• 1. change the password

•

If you fill in with the required information, the confirmation will appear:

5. User manual (5)

• 2. browse items by type, year and author.

The result:

5. User manual (6)

• 3. search items in in different fields: Author (Director of Project) , Title (Project Name), ISBN, ISSN, Conference Name, Journal Name, DOI:

5. User manual (7)

• 4. add:

• a) conference paper

• b) journal paper

• c) project

• d) book

• e) book chapter

5. User manual (9)

• 5. modify or delete items

5. User manual (10)

• 6. make a raport for the same items presented before

• Example:

5. User manual (11)

• The raport is save in a PDF format and contains the fields that are ON

• The admin can choose where to save the .pdf file.

6. Conclusions and future work(1)

• Conclusions :• This project was very useful, not only because we

learned some new technologies and we improved others, but also because we worked in a team.

• So, it will be a great help in our career.

6. Conclusions and future work(2)

• Future work • Firstly, as the goal of the projects states, we should

develop the second interface, the one for the regular user who can add/delete/modify their own indicators

• Also, the project can be improved because now has some bugs. We should test it in order to be sure that the site doesn’t have some bugs that we haven’t seen yet.

• We should improve the save as raport part. Now, we can save our raport only in pdf format. We must extend it in order to be able to save it in other formats: .doc, .xls.

7.Contact

• For any questions related to the project or the used technologies, please contact us:

• Mihai Mihaela: mihmihamih@yahoo.com

• Ristea Andrei risteaandrei@yahoo.com• Ristea Razvan ristearzvn@yahoo.com• Simion Denisa zivy_deny@

yahoo.com• Stefan Sorin s_ryso@yahoo.com• Tudor Sorin soryn22tudor@yahoo.com