YUPlanner

Overview

YUPlanner is a classic three-tier web application: a JavaScript SPA in the browser, a Java REST service, and a relational database. Rather than juggling several disconnected tools, a student can search the catalogue, check prerequisites, build a conflict-free timetable, review professor ratings, track progress, and export a schedule to PDF — all from one interface. The system serves three roles, each with a dedicated dashboard and navigation.

Technology Stack

System Architecture

A three-tier architecture with a clear separation between presentation, application, and data. Presentation ↔ application is stateless HTTP with JSON bodies; application ↔ data is JDBC mediated by Hibernate.

Deployment topology

In the documented development configuration, all three tiers run on the developer's workstation.

A request flows straight down the stack and back: a React component calls the API (Axios/Fetch), Spring MVC routes it to the matching @RestController, which delegates to a service and then a Spring Data repository; Hibernate turns the entity operations into SQL over JDBC, and the JSON result propagates back up to re-render the component. The login and rating sequence diagrams (below) trace this concretely.

CORS: courseController restricts access to http://localhost:3000; the other controllers use a bare @CrossOrigin (all origins) — flagged in Limitations.

Backend Design

The backend is organised into four cooperating layers. A request enters at the controller layer and descends through service and repository layers to the entity/database layer; results return along the same path.

eecs3311.app.yuplanner
|-- YUPlannerApplication.java   // @SpringBootApplication entry point, port 8080
|-- controller/                 // @RestController REST endpoints
|-- service/                    // business logic: interface + Impl
|-- repository/                  // Spring Data JPA repositories
+-- model/                      // @Entity JPA domain objects

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/yuplanner
spring.datasource.driver-class-name=com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver
spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=update
spring.jpa.show-sql=true
spring.jpa.database-platform=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect

REST API Reference

All endpoints are served at http://localhost:8080; request/response bodies are JSON. Each controller declares its own CORS policy.

{ "username": "mhart",
  "password": "password" }

{ "id": 1, "userid": 123456789,
  "firstname": "Maya", "lastname": "Hart",
  "username": "mhart",
  "courses": ["EECS 3311"] }

Two representative flows — the stateless login credential lookup, and the average-rating fetch (which raises a 404 via ResponseStatusException when the professor or reviews are absent):

Authentication is a stateless credential lookup — the SPA posts a username/password to /student/find or /professor/find and receives the matching record (or null). There is no token, session, or password hashing (see Limitations).

Data Model & Database

The domain is modelled by five JPA entities, each mapped to a MySQL table. The only database-enforced association is Rating → professor (@ManyToOne); every other cross-reference is stored as a plain string rather than a foreign key.

All other conceptual links — a student's courses, a professor's courses, an advisor's students — are stored as human-readable strings, so they are neither validated nor joined by the database.

Frontend Design

The frontend is a React 18 SPA scaffolded with Create React App. The root App.js wraps the tree in a <UserProvider> (React Context) and a <BrowserRouter>, then declares all client-side routes. Cross-cutting user state (identity + role) is shared through Context rather than prop-drilling.

UserContext stores the authenticated user + role after login. Components reach the API at localhost:8080 via Axios and Fetch; the schedule view uses jsPDF (with autotable / html2canvas) to export a downloadable weekly timetable.

UI mockups

The UI uses York University's brand red (#E31837) as the primary accent, most visibly on the login screen.

Setup, Build & Deployment

Prerequisites: Java 17 + Maven (wrapper included), MySQL 8.0.40 on localhost:3306, and Node.js 22.11 LTS with npm 10.9.

# 1 · seed the database
mysql -u root -p < backend/db/yuplanner.sql

# 2 · backend → http://localhost:8080
cd backend/yuplanner && mvn spring-boot:run

# 3 · frontend → http://localhost:3000
cd frontend/yuplanner && npm install && npm start

Known Limitations & Future Work

Characteristic of an educational, sprint-scoped project — not broken features, but the items that matter most for security, correctness and maintainability.