ISTS5101 - Software Construction and Development

This course focuses on modern software construction and web application development using the PHP Laravel Framework. Students will learn software development workflows, MVC architecture, backend development, database integration, authentication systems, RESTful APIs, deployment, and collaborative development practices. The course emphasizes hands on implementation through a semester long industry oriented Laravel project. The curriculum covers software construction principles, SDLC overview, Laravel ecosystem setup, project structure, routing, Blade templating, database migrations, Eloquent ORM, CRUD operations, form validation, authentication (login/register, roles, middleware), Eloquent relationships (one to one, one to many, many to many), frontend integration (Bootstrap/Tailwind, Blade components), file upload and storage management, RESTful API development (API routes, JSON responses, API authentication), security (CSRF, SQL injection prevention, error handling, logging), Composer package management, third party integration (notifications, email, payment gateways), testing basics, deployment (shared hosting, VPS, environment configuration), and code/database optimization. Through hands on labs and a project based approach, students will gain practical skills to build and deploy professional Laravel applications.