What are some web applications worth coding for experience?

Question

Lately i got into web development (in asp.net mvc), and i'm looking for some ideas web application ideas worth coding, preferably in an increasing difficulty level. my first app (which i'm currently coding) is a photo gallery web site

Answer 1

A simple blog site (coded from scratch) is pretty good. DB interactivity, logging in for comments... eventually searching, etc :)

Answer 2

I would say a Shopping Cart using Domain Driven Design, Unit Testing, Web Testing and using a OR Mapper :)

Answer 3

Blog is something you will hear a lot but if you want something else you can try to do a simple online game (Not flash...) I mean browser online game.

Answer 4

The application you're likely to get the most out of is the one you most want to actually use. That way you'll have much more motivation to add features, consider usability etc than if you just do one for the sake of learning.

Implementation requirements which are handy to have had experience with though:

• Security (logging in, database security etc)
• Internationalisation (if you're really keen - it can be very tricky!)
• AJAX
• Database access

If you can think of something you might want to actually use that covers most of those, you'll learn a lot. Of course, if you can think of something that isn't already out there, that's even better - when you've started getting somewhere, you can found your own company :)

Answer 5

Try and think of something you would actually use rather then implementing a run of the mill applications. It'll force you to make important design and interface decisions as well as challenge you in how to go about implementing your own ideas.

Answer 6

Write your own CMS.

Answer 7

Something that interests you. If it doesn't interest you, you probably won't finish it. Odds are you'll stop as soon as you hit a snag. But if it interests you, the odds of persevering through the challenges are much higher.

And remember, you learn a lot more pushing past the big obstacles than just coding the bulk.

Answer 8

Perhaps a clear precursor of a blog is a messageboard. While blogs are likely to support things like tagging, archives, search, and comments, discussion boards add the extra element of having users. This means adding authentication, differentiating between types of users, tracking things like post counts, more complex search functions, user attributes (avatar, email, password, etc.), and other such functionality. Not really that far off from making a blog, though.

Answer 9

A simple contacts database is a pretty good starting project.

Answer 10

I would recommend a simple task list application. This gives you some options to play with like notes, tags, ajax, re-ordering, multiple lists and potentially more. You really can make it as simple (just a list of items) or as complex (Remember the Milk) as you like while playing with a number of technologies.

Of course there are the standard blog, wiki, cms options also. As other posters have mentioned, find something you are interested in and start there. Otherwise you likely won't stick with it.

Answer 11

CMS.

It is interesting. Working with ASP.NET, you need to think about masterpages, content pages, etc, and how to work with those programatically and insert web controls at runtime, etc.

Answer 12

The classic network application is a multithreaded socket server of some kind. Try a chat server.

Answer 13

Blog aggregator would be plain easy and interesting for a starter Or some kind of public web services consuming application... Facebook application? :)