Parking Lot Simulation

A coding assignment for a freshers' job recruitment. Written in Java, meant to be compiled and run on Linux. Developed using TDD.

The goal is to simulate a parking lot with a lot-allocation system that assigns an incoming car the lot with the lowest number. It has a Shell-based UI with commands for each car as it enters.

How to build

You'll need Maven and JUnit, as well as the Java JDK and JRE set up.

Then, run the 'parking_lot' file in the the root directory of this application with an option input file as argument.

Working and features

• The main business logic of the entire application runs in the ParkingLot class.
• The UI interface is meant to help run the application. Here, we use the Shell UI.
• The Car class is meant to hold information about the car. Here, we care about its color and registration number.
• BetterParkingLot is a class that improves the parking and leaving efficiency of the parking lot. The idea hit me only after I wrote the initial ParkingLot class.
• Added in a 'help' command that will print all available commands and their use.
• Assumed a few error messages that may pop up on invalid input.

Some design assumptions, missing features and future improvement

• We assume there is only one entrance to the parking lot and that there is only one parking lot to be controlled by our application.
• Regular expression check for valid Registration Numbers on each car has not been implemented.
• Ticketing system has not been implemented completely, though an interface has been written for future use. For our current application, the ticketing logic was unnecessary.
• Idiot-proofing of individual commands (eg. printing use of each command or checking adherance to syntax) has not been implemented.
• Have no implemented a little shell prompt to make the shell command-writing more legible.
• Have not allowed for printing output to a file instead of STDOUT.
• Code is not thread safe.
• No support for multiple parking lots per shell or multiple shells.