CNEC Digital
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Building the CNEC EdTech Portal
The CNEC Digital was developed as a comprehensive digital platform to support the academic and administrative needs of students and teachers across the CNEC network. The project combines learning management, institutional communication, and reporting tools into a unified environment — all built with a strong focus on scalability and maintainability.
Custom Framework on Tomcat
Instead of relying on a large external framework, the platform runs on a custom-built framework, designed to take full advantage of the fast delivery in JAVAEE application server.
This decision allowed complete control over request handling, routing, and caching strategies, leading to a lightweight and highly optimized solution.
The framework integrates:
- Custom annotations for routing and dependency injection
- A dynamic ORM layer with reflection-based model mapping
- In-memory caching strategies for improved performance
- A modular structure for independent app components (chat, notifications, posts, exams, reports, etc.)
Technology Stack
- Java EE (Servlets, Filters, JSP, Tag Files)
- Tomcat 9
- MySQL for data persistence
- HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript on the frontend
- Bootstrap for responsive UI
Development Highlights
One of the key challenges was building a framework that balanced flexibility and performance.
The routing and ORM modules were written from scratch, allowing the system to avoid the overhead of popular frameworks like Spring while retaining clean, declarative code organization.
Caching and data reloading were also designed to optimize for both short-lived request-level data and persistent reports, ensuring consistent performance across multiple schools and thousands of concurrent users.
Outcome
The result is a robust, fully integrated educational portal capable of managing courses, content, students, and assessments.
Its modular architecture and self-contained Java EE foundation make it easy to maintain and extend — an important factor in supporting CNEC’s growing network of institutions.
A Few Highlights
The portal includes a social network–like post system. These posts can have additional types, such as activity or meeting, as shown in the screenshot below.
CNEC Meet
An integrated component of CNEC Digital, this feature allows teachers to create meetings or live classes that students can join.
Calendar
This calendar app was built with React and is also integrated with CNEC Digital. It supports multiple layers of events — for example, global, per unit, per classroom, and private ones for each user.
It also supports several view modes, including Year, Month, Week, and Day.
My Role
In this project, I worked as a full-stack lead developer with a focus on the back end, but I also handled several front-end areas — the calendar being one of them. Whenever the code reached a certain level of complexity, I was there to provide a solution, such as implementing infinite scroll to load new posts or creating a custom HTML editor for those same posts.
The project also gave me the opportunity to fine-tune the routing mechanics of the custom framework on which these sites are based.
I currently maintain this project.
