ENGINEERING CASE STUDY · BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
Restaurant Reservation System
Engineering case study.
LARAVEL 9 · PHP 8 · BREEZE · TAILWIND CSS · ALPINE.JS · MYSQL · LARAVEL SAIL · PHPUNIT
A Laravel app where guests book a table in two steps and staff run the restaurant from an admin panel.
- Role
- Full stack developer
- Type
- Built for a small restaurant chain in the UAE
- Status
- Transformed and delivered for a client
- Source
- Base project public; client-modified components private
01 / OVERVIEW
The project
A restaurant website with a public menu and a reservation flow. Guests choose a date, time and party size, then pick from the tables that are actually free. Staff manage categories, menus, tables and reservations from a protected admin panel. The project was transformed and produced for a small chain of restaurants in the UAE. The public repository contains the base project only; the components completed or modified for the client are privately owned and cannot be shared.
02 / ARCHITECTURE
How it fits together
How a guest booking and the staff admin panel share one Laravel application.
USER
Guest
Browses the menu and books a table in two steps: details and time, then table choice.
Sends to: Validation rules
Based on the published repository.
03 / CONTRIBUTION
My contribution
- Built the two-step reservation flow: guest details and date and time are validated and kept in the session, then the guest chooses from available tables.
- Implemented booking rules on the server: reservations within the next week and between 17:00 and 23:00, using custom validation rules.
- Filtered table choices by availability, capacity for the party size, and existing bookings for the chosen day.
- Built the admin panel with CRUD for categories, menus (with image upload and many-to-many categories), tables and reservations.
- Protected the admin area with Laravel Breeze authentication and an admin middleware based on an admin flag.
04 / ENGINEERING
Engineering notes
- Business rules live in dedicated validation rule classes, so the same rules apply regardless of which form submits the data.
- Tables carry a location (front, inside or outside), a status and a capacity, modelled with PHP enums.
- The public site and the admin area use separate controller namespaces and routes, keeping guest-facing and staff-facing code apart.
- Laravel Sail provides a Docker-based development environment.
TECHNOLOGY
Tools selected for the work.
- Laravel 9 and PHP 8. Routing, validation, Eloquent relationships and authentication are built in, which suits a booking system with strict server-side rules and an admin area, and PHP hosting is easy to find for a small business.
- Laravel Breeze. A lightweight, proven login system for staff, with no need to build authentication from scratch.
- Blade, Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js. Server-rendered pages load fast on any device guests use, and Alpine adds just enough interactivity without a full frontend framework.
- MySQL. Tables, menus and reservations are relational, and availability is calculated by querying existing bookings.
- Laravel Sail and PHPUnit. Docker keeps the development environment identical across machines, and PHPUnit protects the booking rules.