[Karupan]

People outside India may not realize the importance of train tickets and how difficult they can be to book. Trains are still the primary mode of transport for long distance travel and some routes get booked out in minutes after reservations open. There have been ticket mafias who mass book tickets and resell them in the black market for a huge profit.

I do appreciate that the developer was solving a genuine need, so kudos to him. But anyone from India could've seen the government's reaction coming a mile away.

[dsq]

If indeed there is a mafia-controlled black market in ticket sales, perhaps the mafia got a corrupt bureaucrat to use state force to shut down competition.

[tartoran]

That’s not unheard of.

[avh02]

when i visited india, i found the "next generation" booking system to be a bit of a joke, so i don't blame this guy for trying to make it better (whether or not he was profiting).

My favourite part was the "maintenance" window the website would go through every night. Which was never really indicated on the website other than vague messages/errors - but everybody knew that's what it was.

[jkoudys]

This is most Indian web apps, I find. The article is great because it ties it the well known failures in implementation to massive legal, bureaucratic, and cultural problems. India has no shortage of talented programmers. I find it hard enough to work with clients who want status reports every hour and change requirements frequently, I can't imagine ever getting anything done with the spectre of physical arrest hanging over me too.

[moh_maya]

I think This is a very naïve, unfair take on one of the world's most sophisticated, complex, real-time booking systems that is unparalleled in what it enables. [1,2]

The front end definitely can be much much better; but the issue is very simply there are not enough tickets to match the demand.

"From 29 tickets booked in a day in 2002, it has reached to 13 Lakh tickets a day as of now. It is reported that the IRCTC system is currently capable of booking 15K tickets a minute online and can handle 3 Lakh concurrent users to handle any surge in demand." [1] (13 lakhs is 1.3 million)

"Of the 15 million passengers who climb aboard one of 8,520 trains each day, about 550,000 have reserved accommodations. Their journeys can start in any part of India and end in any other part, with travel times as long as 48 hours and distances up to several thousand kilometres. The challenge is to provide a reservation system that can support such a huge number-regardless of whether it’s measured by kilometres, passenger numbers, routing complexity, or simply the sheer scale of country. " [2]

If anyone has better references on the frankly astounding technical accomplishment that the CRIS Passenger Reservation system, please share.

"Passenger Reservation System (PRS): A nationwide online passenger reservation and ticketing system, developed and maintained by CRIS, was developed in C and Fortran on a Digital OpenVMS operating system using RTR (Reliable Transaction Router) as middleware. Also known as CONCERT (Country-wide Network of Computerised Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing), it interconnects the four regional computing systems (in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai) into a national PRS grid. It allows a passenger anywhere to book train tickets from any station to any station. PRS handles reservations, changes, cancellations and refunds, reserving over 1.6 million seats and berths daily. Complex rules, validations and fare-computation techniques are interwoven in the application" [3]

[1] https://inc42.com/features/how-online-train-booking-ticket-p...

[2] http://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/25869/1/Unit-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Railway_Information...

[namdnay]

> frankly astounding technical accomplishment that the CRIS Passenger Reservation system

Believe me, I know well the complexities involved in developing computerised reservation systems, but I'm not sure what is astounding about this - it's what every CRS does. 550k bookings a day is nothing extraordinary

[avh02]

I dunno, given a server upgrade (of itanium servers, in 2018!) shaved 15 minutes off the maintenance window [1]

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the whole railway system is a small feat - i wouldn't want to be working on that project, but it's definitely not to "next generation" standards in 2014 (and definitely wasn't when i visited in 2018)

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation...

[Niten]

> If anyone has better references on the frankly astounding technical accomplishment that the CRIS Passenger Reservation system, please share.

Huh? You've described a run-of-the-mill, moderate-scale reservation system. This is not "astounding" in any sense except, perhaps, the hyperbole.

[pzh]

15k reservations per min is 250 tps. If that’s the maximum it can handle, I wouldn’t call it very scalable.

[baybal2]

> Fortran on a Digital OpenVMS

Fortran on a Digital OpenVMS.... in 2020

[C1sc0cat]

Just WOW! and I say that as some one who developed billing systems in Fortran.

[vmception]

but when your frontend also looks and acts like its from 2002, how parallelized your backend is doesn't matter

its like when you see a php extension on a website, there isn't an inherent limitation with php and it is made to be quite performant, you just know the people involved have a high correlation of making UI/UX an afterthought and stuck in a different decade and this is highly correlated with other afterthoughts on performance