bahnsparen.de is a free platform for train travellers bahnsparen.dewhich want to benefit from relatively cheap group tickets. Users which plan to go on a ride by train can advertise their route and other travellers can join them in order to use a discounted group ticket.

The web-application was built with Ruby on Rails which combines the elegant Ruby programming language with a sophisticated web framework. RoR is strictly MVC and favours convention over configuration. I.e. that the programmer will have to learn a few of those conventions and in return is rewarded with a a ton of automagically included functions which seem to be intelligent.

The project is still work in progress. The main focus was learning a new (and beautiful) programming language and optimizing the server to be able to deal with millions of page-hits every day. The result is a website which is loading very fast and at the same time including quite an amount of fancy dynamic features. Although it is even including a sophisticated auto-completion engine, javascript animation and a flexible internationalization system it is lighting-fast and has only a 200kb footprint.

More detailed information about bahnsparen.de to be added in the next couple of days..