Overview

Coursework Background

The coursework project for Web Technologies involved building a location tracking app, designed to track attendance across the University in the way that allows members of staff to check which students are currently present in lectures and who has tapped in using an online web portal.

The application has also been built to be extendible, with a 3rd party API being available allowing external requests to be made and retrieved to get student locations at that time, meaning that it could be integrated with the University’s Learning Management System.

Technology

• PHP front-end for the application (module requirement)
• MSSQL back-end (module requirement)
• Client-side JavaScript for loading changes in locations dynamically

Functionality

The application has functionality allowing members of staff to add new students or other members of staff, search for students by room, view or update user account information, retrieve all users locations at the current time and historically over the past 24 hours and beyond.

Conclusion

I was required to using PHP for this project due to the structure of the course, however, I would prefer to build a project like this in React as I think it would work better and be more scalable.

I included all the functionality that the project needed and learnt more about both SQL and PHP though, so it was an interesting learning experience and I was pleased with the end product I produced.