WorkGrabber.com - Sweet ASP.NET MVC 1.0 + jQuery Application
You may have noticed this blog has been awfully quiet in the past couple of months. That's because I've been working on a neat side project with a couple of other developers. Today, we'd like to submit our project to the ASP.NET community to get some feedback. The site is called WorkGrabber.com. You can check it out here: http://workgrabber.com
What we're trying to create with WorkGrabber is something like the eBay of local service contractors. In an nutshell, when you post a job, you're bringing the entire project directly to contractors in detail. You can upload photos and videos as well as answer questions and interact with contractors while keeping your information private. You can review bids from local contractors and accept the one that you like the most. You can read more about the features of WorkGrabber on the WorkGrabber blog. In this post, I want to focus more on the technology we used to create it.
We started developing WorkGrabber during the earlier releases of ASP.NET MVC although we were pretty sure we weren't going to release it until the first RTM. It gave us more time to beta test the site with friends and family before releasing it into the wild. Here's a breakdown of some of the tools we used.
WorkGrabber is built on top of ASP.NET MVC 1.0. Not a whole lot changed in the past couple releases of MVC so upgrading was fairly simple. The data access code is developed mostly using LINQ to SQL with a SQL 2005 database. jQuery is used throughout the site to create some cool visual effects. For example, we used jQuery Tag Suggestion plugin to create this neat auto-suggest tagging feature for when you're posting a job.
Throughout WorkGrabber, we use the jQuery Facebox plugin to create really cool modal windows. The modal windows themselves are ViewUserControls which are rendered back to the client. Here's an example:
The majority of images are hosted by ImageShack and the galleries use the jQuery lightBox plugin to create a really neat modal effect. So much is built into this jQuery plugins that they really make client side development a blast.
I plan to post more about the internals of WorkGrabber in later posts. I'd love to hear some of your feedback. If you have a project on your "honey-do" list that you keep putting off, try posting it on WorkGrabber to get some free local contractor bids.
Try posting a job and let me know what you think in the comments here.