Our client from United Kingdom trusted us on creating an online booking system. This application is intentionally made for guesthouses, B&Bs, small hotels, and of course their customers. It allows hotel owners to manage their guests, bookings, rates, etc. In order to ease the booking process, web owners may put a snippet of code onto their sites. This will display a mini-calendar and permit online bookings through the sites.

The project has been started on November 2009 and running well until today. There are still improvements those will be implemented. The most interesting and challenging task is the amount of jQuery syntaxes used on this project. One of them is an embedded, customized drag and drop feature on a calendar to satisfy our client needs of a new concept. User could select booking days by dragging across a range of dates, rather than clicking on desired dates multiple times.

In addition, our client wanted this application running well on iPhone, iPad, and Mobile Devices. We did it and made it listed in Apple AppStore. The app lets you view summary of user bookings, create new bookings, register new guests, view, edit, or initiate a call to a guest from within the app.

Technologies involved:

• Exporting file is an important feature. It provides a leisure choice to users. We pick fastercsv for csv/excel format and prawn for PDF format.
• We use whenever to erase expired bookings every a period of time. Whenever creates cron job with ruby syntax and does the job very well.
• This application handles online payments from numerous payment gateways. Spreedly comes in handy for this task; moreover it also deals with recurrence billing.
• Application have to be able to determine user country from IP address information, geoip covers this requirement.
• Rails-settings takes part on saving application settings and calling previously saved settings. As a result, every hotel owner may have a different setting and this will not influence the application itself.
• Internet is a worldwide tool, thus this application has to be worldwide too. Hotel owners must be able to choose what currency will be used regarding his local or any other accepted currencies. Money Gem provides a great help.
• This software uses Google Data API, so we installed GData Rails specific helpers for Google API. It saves us a significant development time and cost.