[Esims-devs] Bit of explanation

[Juby V. <vi...@ne...>]

Jermel,
First of all thanx a lot for the effort put in despite your hectic 
schedule..

Let me try to answer your questions..this maybe of benefit to others too ,

Semesters dont exist here in schooling system, it does in colleges. So 
in order to be flexible lets call it some other name.

A subject is v generic ; like 'english' / 'maths'
A course is a subclass of subject taught in an academic year for a 
particular class by a particular teacher. eg:- English for Std 5
Course will have a set of chapters to be taught from the prescribed text 
book, which we call as syllabus, this set may /maynot have all chapters 
in the text book.
So the course will contain subject id , syllabus id , academic year id, 
class id  and teacher id

Many courses with their individual syllabus will be clubbed together to 
form a 'curriculum' . A curriculum needs to be associated with multiple 
'courses' and one academic year
eg:- curicullum for std 5 will have 'englih, maths  ... AND syllabus for 
english, syllabus for maths ...' etc

A class will be associated with a curicullum (Please note that class is 
not standard ; standard is say 5th std , but 'class' is group of 
students in a standard , in a particular division for a particular 
academic year undergoing the torture of a curriculum) we need to find a 
different name for 'class' too


A typical academic year is of 10 months for a particular class , and the 
remaining 2 months are summer vacations

A teacher may teach multiple subjects in multiple 'classes'
A class will always have a 'class teacher' ,academic year , curicullum 
id, and in turn curriculum will be associated with syllabi (multiple 
syllabus for courses)


Creatin new databases for each year looks like a big maintenance 
overhead to me , and we cant afford to forget a student if some data 
loss happens ;) , and many a times data migration can be painful. If the 
need calls for we can go for a slightly denormalized db to avoid perf hits.

Java Generics
Im not v convinced of the value addition it gives b'coz ive never used 
it in production. To be honest i'm not sure and comfortable with writing 
and using generic types. But always + for using it in collections and 
for loops. As mentioned earlier the DAO repetition problem can be solved 
by implementing an interface.

Ashay
If you are aware of the pros and cons of generics can u plz give us some 
insight ?

Ive still not been able to do the commit to the branch , and i'll try to 
do it today so that u guys can have a look at it. It may not be complete 
, but it will give a overall picture of what we have.


Thnx
JV