Classroom-Manager REST API Flask Project 🏫

Project Overview 📝

The Classroom-Manager project is designed as a robust educational resource management system, featuring:

• Purpose: Facilitate the management of educational resources within academic institutions, such as classrooms, departments, and user accounts.
• Core Feature: High-quality RESTful API that allows for efficient management of user records, classes, and classroom bookings.
• Target Audience: Ideally suited for schools and universities looking to digitize and streamline their resource allocation and scheduling processes.
• API Functionality: Provides a scalable and secure interface for developers to integrate and extend functionalities seamlessly.
• Technology Stack: Utilizes modern technologies including Flask for the backend, SQLAlchemy for ORM, and PostgreSQL as the database.

How to Run the Application 🔧

To get the application up and running, follow these steps:

1. Setup with Docker:

• Clone the repository to your local machine.
• Navigate to the backend directory of the project.
• Use Docker Compose to build and run the containers:

  docker-compose up -d

2. Running the Application:

• Access the backend services via localhost:6200/docs where you can interact with the API through its Swagger documentation.

How to Stop the Application 🔌

To stop and remove the application containers, use the following Docker Compose commands:

• Stopping the application:

  docker-compose stop

• Removing the application:

  docker-compose down

Architecture 🔍

The backend architecture of Classroom-Manager is designed around a clean separation of concerns, promoting maintainability and scalability:

• Presentation Layer (/routes): Manages API endpoints, serving as the interface that receives requests and sends responses.
• Business Logic Layer (/services): Processes data, applying business rules and handling operations like user authentication, resource management, etc.
• Data Access Layer (/repositories & /models): Responsible for database interactions, ensuring data integrity and providing an abstraction layer over direct database manipulations.

Key Directories 📍

• /migrations: Contains database migration scripts.
• /src: The heart of the application where the main logic resides.
  • /app: The core application folder.
    • /repositories: Contains code interacting with the database.
    • /models: Defines the data models.
    • /orm: Object-relational mapping setup.
    • /serializations: Code for serializing and deserializing data.
    • /routes: Defines the endpoints of the API.
    • /services: Business logic of the application.

Technologies 🌐

• Flask: A lightweight framework for building web applications in Python.
• SQLAlchemy: An ORM tool for database operations, enhancing code maintainability and security.
• JWT Libraries: Handling authentication using JSON Web Tokens.
• Docker: Containerization of the application ensuring consistent environments.
• PostgreSQL: The primary relational database used for storing all application data.

API Capabilities 💡

• User Management: Register, authenticate, update, and manage user profiles.
• Department Management: Create, update, delete, and retrieve departments within an organization.
• Building Management: Handle operations related to building resources including CRUD operations.
• Classroom Management: Manage classrooms, including scheduling and booking functionalities.
• Request Management: Handle booking requests for classrooms, managing approvals and rejections.

Database Interaction 🗃

The application uses PostgreSQL as its database. The ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) provided by SQLAlchemy abstracts the SQL layer, offering a high-level interface for database operations. The repository pattern further encapsulates the logic needed to access data sources, ensuring that the business logic is not dependent on database specifics.

Docker Configuration 🐳

The application runs in Docker containers. The docker-compose.yml file orchestrates multiple services:

• Flask Application Container: Hosts the Flask application.
• PostgreSQL Container: Manages the database service, isolated from the application logic.