By: Brendan McGrane
December, 2000
Advisor: Dr. Dean Brock

At the start of each semester, student athletes who receive book scholarships from the athletic department bring a hard copy of the classes they are taking for the upcoming semester. The person that oversees the book scholarships searches the storeroom of used books the athletic department already has in stock (the students return their books at the end of each semester).This process was slow and resulted in students waiting in long lines. So I decided to computerize the system.

I chose to have the students enter their class information on the web. The results would be saved to a database, where the book scholarship supervisor could have easy access to see what books a student could get second hand from the storage room and what books needed to be purchased from the bookstore. I used Java servlets and made a connection to an MS Access database using a JDBC-ODBC bridge. Servlets are Java applications that run on the server side and enable dynamic web content. They do not provide and graphical interfaces, but using the HttpServlet classes in the servlet API embedded HTML is allowed in the Java code to produce output.

The student uses their last name and social security number to log into the program. The last name and SS# are checked in a table to validate the user, and to direct them to the log in screen. Once validated, the servlet produces a screen to enter department, class number, and section. The student then submits these classes and another servlet creates a connection to the database and verifies that all the classes submitted are valid classes and places these classes into a table with the users name. It also tests for the existence of a used book in the storage room in the athletic department and enters this book as available to be re-used. A new screen is displayed showing the valid and invalid (if needed) classes that the student entered. They are also give the choice to add or remove classes on the list, or if they comeback a second time after they have added or dropped a class.

The database contains reports for the supervisor that allows him to search individual students for a list of the classes they entered and which books are available second hand. There are also reports for a list of all the second hand books that will be reused and a list that the bookstore will be given for all the books that are needed from them.