Building the backend for Student Helper

The Motivation Behind the Project

The Student Helper API is the backend that powers the course progression platform. It exists to keep the domain rules, course data, and planning logic separated from the frontend so the user interface can stay focused on presentation.

Core Features and Design Goals

• Course data delivery: the API serves the information the planning UI depends on.
• Progression logic support: the backend helps the frontend reason about the path toward a degree.
• Separation of concerns: the rules live in the backend instead of being duplicated in the UI.

Technical Implementation

• Built RESTful endpoints with JavaEE (JAX-RS) exposing course data, prerequisite relationships, and degree requirements through a structured API that the Angular frontend consumes via typed HTTP calls.
• Implemented a relational database schema modeling courses, prerequisites, semesters, and degree tracks, with JPA/Hibernate for ORM and optimized queries for prerequisite chain traversal.
• Designed the API with separation of concerns across controller, service, and repository layers, keeping business logic (prerequisite validation, credit calculation) in the service layer and data access isolated in repositories.

The Technology Stack

Built with JavaEE using JAX-RS for REST endpoints and JPA/Hibernate for ORM. The architecture follows a layered pattern (controller/service/repository) with a relational database schema modeling course prerequisites as a directed graph.

Final Reflections

A good backend is often invisible when it works well, and that was the goal here.