The document describes creating an online employee travel authorization form and database for a computer science department. It will automate the submission process and save time by eliminating email. The form will connect to a MySQL database using Hibernate for object relational mapping. User authentication will come from the university's LDAP directory. Key milestones are designing the form, creating the database, and integrating them using Hibernate.

1. Employee travel authorization form
The goal of this project is to create an employee travel authorization form for our
computer science department web site in order to properly account for official travel of the
employees. The main aim of this project is to automate the submission of travel authorization
process and avoid the existing method of e-mail submission. This will probably save employees
time and e-mail space.
The project aims at creating a database for the travel forms and connecting it to the
employee travel authorization form. We are going to connect the database design to the
employee travel authorization form through java object/relational mapping; transaction
management and connection management of the database through hibernate. The measurable
outcome of this project is the creation of database and making sure that the data that the user
enters in the form is properly updated in the database. The user authentication is pretty
important module as we are going to use the university database of users to access the
database that we are creating. The access level of the database and the user access restriction
should be properly maintained.
In order to properly account for official travel, employees should make sure that the
online Travel Authorization Form is completed and approved before travel is taken, even if no
WKU reimbursement is involved. This approval must be obtained through the Dean of the
College and, if travel outside the Continental U.S. (OCONUS), by the Office of the Provost and so
we must make sure that they have their restriction in accessing their respective forms.

2. The technologies that we use are JavaScript for the purpose of designing the Travel
Authorization Form, MySQL for database design and java for object mapping through hibernate.
The university user authentication will be provided by LDAP which contains more descriptive,
attribute based data.
The major milestones of the project are the Travel Authorization Form design and the
creation of the database. Once these two processes are completed, the next milestone would
be integrating the database to the forms; by using java object/relational mapping through
hibernate which also facilitates storage and retrieval of java domain objects.
Why we are using hibernate?
We are using hibernate to provide the database and configuration data to persistence
services (and persistent objects) to the application. To use Hibernate, it is required to create
Java classes that represents the table in the database and then map the instance variable in
the class with the columns in the database. Then Hibernate can be used to perform
operations on the database like select, insert, update and delete the records in the table.
Hibernate automatically creates the query to perform these operations.