are there simple, open source learning-friendly web apps?

Question

I was wondering if I could learn ASP.net or other web programming frameworks by studying existing functional open source apps of the simpler kind. As in, of not quite MediaWiki complexity and so forth. Perhaps something like "simple forum" or "simple web store". Something that is non-trivial and demonstrating useful functionality, but not overly complex and afflicted with hard to understand feature bloat.

So, could people suggest some apps of this kind for study? Does anybody know let's say of some straigtforward forum app in ASP.net that would be a good learning tool for an experienced programmer with minimal web app exposure? Or likewise of good open source apps for study of PHP, JavaEE and/or other popular web frameworks?

Answer 1

FOR RUBY : Apart from Ruby On Rails, have a look at

Ramaze - Zen and the Art of Programming (The name comes from Ruby Amaze..) Ramaze home page at Ramaze Home

FOR ASP.NET

BlogEngine.net is a good code base for learning.

Similarly, for beginners you can refer to some of the projects from

ASP.NET Community projects, some of them are pretty good. This do have reference to forum apps as well.

Stephen Walther has a good post on creating a Forum application in ASP.NET MVC which you can find here Forum Application Development

Answer 2

There are many web application frameworks in most programming languages:

• CakePHP
• Catalyst
• Django
• Rails

All are good in getting things done fast. Most of them have screencasts that walk you through the code to a full-fledged web application. I think you should check those screencasts out.

Answer 3

For the Ruby on Rails framework, this site lists some open source apps: http://www.opensourcerails.com

Answer 4

Different frameworks are wildly different. One application will not help you in learning another framework, so you would probably need to decide the framework first. And usually, the best introduction for a framework is it's tutorial, as they tend to take up the concepts in a logical order, while just reading code will either be hard to understand or be prone to misunderstandings that give you the wrong idea that you later will have to "unlearn".

Some frameworks I know of that are really easy to get started with are RubyOnRails, Django and Grok.