Software engineering is the application of engineering principles to the design, development, maintenance, testing and evaluation of computer software. It includes procedural and systematic techniques for development such as the waterfall model and spiral model. A software project in Java can include different types of applications like console, window, web or mobile applications. It involves connecting a MySQL database to the project using Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). Common database operations like insert, update, delete and search can be performed on the database through Java code and button clicks. Reports can also be generated from the database.