A couple months ago I received, as I'm sure as did many others, an email about the $10,000 MortgageLoanPlace.com "Super Sexy" Mortgage Calculator contest. I decided that I'd be worth a shot and it'd give me a good opportunity to dig a bit more in depth into jQuery.
Also, and this is something I've always loved about programming aside from the actual coding, it gave me the opportunity to work with something that I've never had the chance to tackle (in this case mortgage calculations). I've worked on payroll and timekeeping projects before but I've never worked on anything that had to do with finance and loans. I've found that writing the software isn't as always as interesting as what you're writing the software for. I've helped to write software to track the radiation readings for building decommisioning and deconstruction at a DOE nuclear site. I've written software to track patient information for people with Tuberculosis and Hepatitis B. And now I'm writing a mortgage calculator.
I am pleased to announce that, as of a month ago, my entry was chosen as the winning submission.
My calculator was completely written in JavaScript and jQuery and consists of a single 22K packed script. I used a simplified version of the code mentioned in an earlier post to embed the CSS directly within the script (I hate all of the baggage that comes with most scripts you want to add to your pages; scripts, stylesheets, and images).
It was also designed to be infinitely configurable. The logo, colors, fields, labels, and default values can all be modified (you can check out the Mortgage Loan Place's custom mortgage calculator page here).
Lastly, the calculator is capable of rendering two different layouts: the standard one and a widget calculator. The standard layout is intended to be placed on a regular page and the widget calculator consists of a compact layout to be placed within sidebars.
Here is an example of this calculator (be sure to check out MortgageLoanPlace.com if you'd like further details or would like to include this calculator on your site):
