Java Technologies - Lab 4

Project: PrefSchedule
The goal of this project is to design a system that automatically assigns students to optional courses based on their preferences, course capacity, and instructors' preferences.
The system should ensure a fair distribution of students using a stable-matching algorithm.
We will continue working on this project during the next labs.

Java Persistence API

Compulsory (1p)

• Create a Spring Boot Project that has support for Spring Data JPA, and PostgreSQL.
• Using an SQL script, create tables for:
  • students (id, code, name, email, year)
  • instructors (id, name, email)
  • packs (id, year, semester, name)
  • courses (id, type, code, abbr, name, instructor_id, pack_id, group_count, description)
  A course can be compulsory or optional. Optional courses are grouped in packs. A student will be assigned exactly one course from each pack in their year.
• Create the entity class and a repository for students.
• Implement a simple test using a CommandLineRunner.

Homework (2p)

• Create all the entity classes. Use @OneToMany and @ManyToOne associations. (You may use Lombok, but it is not necessarily required.)
• Think carefully if Student and Instructor should inherit a base abstract class.
• Create Spring JPA repositories for all entities.
• Think what queries may be necessary and define them in the repos: use at least one query based on a specific JPQL string, one derived query, and one transactional, modifying query.
• Create a @Service class for each entity, that uses the corresponding repo.
• Use Java Faker to populate the database and test CRUD operations for courses.

Advanced (2p)

• Use Criteria API to implement a dynamic search for courses, with multiple optional filters
  (e.g., "which optional courses are in year 3, semester 2", or "which courses are taught by a specific instructor")
• Implement first-level caching using Spring Cache and measure read performance improvements.
  Use a micro-testing or benchmarking library, such as JMH, for measuring the execution time of methods. (You need to handle JIT compilation, warm-up, and measurement accuracy correctly.)