Great ASP.NET AJAX Web Portal Starter Kit: dropthings.com

I  was very excited to see that Omar AL Zabir, co-founder & CTO Pageflakes has created a very cool AJAX based Web portal https://dropthings.com.  And even more excited to see he has posted all the code in an open source way!   Now you can build your own Ajax portal fun! 

Dropthings is a open source Web 2.0 Ajax Portal that shows the power of several .NET Framework 3.5 technologies.  It supports widget based modularized website, drag and drop personalization of content and an open API for widgets.  It is the sample featured in the book, Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 and you can use it as a personal portal, a group website, a public portal or as a dashboard for an enterprise that aggregates services from different systems.

Download Dropthings

Visit the Codeplex Project

See it Live!

Cool Features

• Aggregation of content from external sources e.g. Flickr, Weather, Horoscope, and any type of RSS
• Highly decoupled Widget Architecture
• Homepage personalization using drag & drop
• Absolutely zero postback in the entire website
• Themes
• Full feature supported for anonymous users
• Open API for widget development

 

Technologies he shows off...

• ASP.NET 3.5
• An advanced REST call handler for asynchronous, transactional, cache friendly web methods
• Content Proxy for bridging content from external domain
• Themes
• Personalization
• Membership and Profile provider
• Anonymous Identification Provider
• Data binding using Linq
• Data Access Layer built using Linq
• Business layer built using Windows Workflow Foundation

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2008
  PingBack from http://www.biosensorab.org/2008/02/13/great-aspnet-ajax-web-portal-starter-kit-dropthingscom/

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2008
  This looks awesome Can someone tell me why this does not leverage the Web Part Framework built into ASP.Net 2.0?   Is there a basic limitation with Web Parts or was it just user preference?

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2008
  I have exactly the same question as Jason. Does this have to do with postbacks being necessary with webparts? And does 'Absolutely zero postback in the entire website' mean that it is perfectly able to use with ASP.NET MVC?

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2008
  You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2008
  ASP.NET Great ASP.NET AJAX Web Portal Starter Kit: dropthings.com [Via: BradA ] Sharepoint VSeWSS 1.1...

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2008
  Link Listing - February 13, 2008

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2008
  I guess the web site is down today...

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2008
  >>>>> I guess the web site is down today... Hmm.. seems to work for me.. Maybe they already took care of it...

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2008
  @Jason, I could be wrong, but the web parts of ASP.NET 2.0 does not work well with browsers other than IE it seemed. Plus, I think this solution is a lot lighter and more flexible.

• Anonymous
  February 28, 2008
  Very nice implementation!

• Anonymous
  April 16, 2008
  Using ASP.NET MVC would require a re-write of the application to harness the framework.  However, that shouldn't be much trouble and I myself, intend to get started in about 3-4 months if I don't see one pop up.