In order to get an an Online Railway Reservation (e-ticket), all one needs is the following:

• Internet enabled computer
• Identity proof (needs to be declared while booking and shown while travelling)
• Mode of payment (Credit card, debit card, net payment through account etc)
• Printer to print the e-ticket
• Age/Senior citizen proof (incase you took a ticket in Senior Citizen quota)

People who do not have access to internet can also make use of these websites by getting their tickets booked through local Internet Cafes, Agents etc that use online booking to reserve tickets for these passengers.

Here’s a list of some of the websites that offer online rail reservations. I’ve also tried to highlight some of the distinguishing features of each website.

Click on a logo for more information on that website

makemytrip

By far this website offers the best user experience. It is simple to use and provides you multiple options on the basic search page. You can get a fair enough idea of the availability status on the result page itself and don’t have to click on each train and view it’s status separately. However, there’s a catch here, the default search results that are displayed to the user are not the latest status’, but cached data i.e. data captured sometime back. To get the latest status, you will have to fetch the updated status for your particular choice. I would still say, that this is good approach, as in most cases, travellers prefer to check various trains and then pick up the ones’ that suit them. Here, you get an idea of status (time, availability, rates) of all the trains and can simply refresh status for the one’s that suit you.

Some of the distinguishing features of makemytrip as compared to it’s competitors:
- choice between oneway and return trip
- While searching if you select “flexible dates”, the search results will be displayed for 4 days.
- While searching if you select “flexible class”, the search results will be displayed for different classes, e.g. Sleeper, AC 3 Tier, AC 2 Tier etc
- After getting the search results, you can refine the data by selecting your preferred time of departure/arrival
-You can also save passenger details and avoid having to fill in these details every time you book rail tickets.

Make My Trip - Click on the picture to view a snapshot of the result page

IRCTC

This is the first online reservation portal that made life easy for internet buffs, followed by the aam janta. It started in the year 2002. The website is owned and managed by the Indian Government. The website is little slow as compared to some of it’s competitors. Once you make a search and select the train and Class of travel, it displays availability of future dates as well. It also provides rail tour packages and a whole lot of information on Indian Railways.

IRCTC Result page - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

cleartrip

Although not very impressive to look at. The website is crip and clean and much faster than most of it’s competitors. Does give you an option to change dates and travel class on the search result page. But the like most other sites, you need to fetch the status of each train individually.
One interesting feature of this website is that you can email the search result.

Cleartrip - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

yatra

They also provide you the option to alter Travel Date (Previous/Next) and Travel Class. Overall not a very impressive website as it is very slow. But does provide the service and is another option.

Yatra - Click on the picture to view a readable snapshot of the result page

ezeego

Although you need to get individual status of each train, ezeego offers couple of interesting features that non of the other sites does:
- View route
- Email Result for a specific train
The website has a lot of bugs, I tried to book a tickets 3 times, but failed! It is also relatively slow.

Some of the websites that I found really useful:

First Cry : They call themselves “Asia’s Largest Online Baby and Kid’s Store”. Well, they certainly are largest in my house! They have a vast range of products and offer different discounts from time to time. The biggest saver being discounts on Diapers, keeping in mind the consumption in every household with infants/toddlers. Avoids me the pain in carrying the bulky packages too. By far, this website offers maximum discount on diapers as compared to any other player, be it an online store, pharmacy, retail chains like Big Bazaar, Easyday etc. First Cry also offers vouchers through various deal sites e.g. Snapdeal and Khojguru. They offer a large variety of toys for all ages from many big brands. The downside with toys here is that there aren’t too many options for lower budget. Not a great variety in clothes either.
They have a great 24/7 customer support that I’ve used many times, free shipping (orders more than Rs 200) and an option for cash on delivery (orders more than Rs 2000). Incase you are not satisfied with the product, they have a return policy too.
All in all, a decent shopping experience, saves a lot of time too.

First Cry

BabyOye : Started by young parents to make life simpler for other parents! BabyOye provides many options in toys. The best part is that they have a mix of both international and Indian brands. This makes purchasing easier as they also offer items that do not pinch a hole in the pocket.

BabyOye also offers discounts in various sections. To keep it simple, they also have a return policy incase you don’t like what you get.

BabyOye

Hush Babies : This website offers a wide range of products. Their best feature being the nice clothing options. They offer discounted apparel on Indian brands like Lilliput and some imported stuff as well. No discount on diapers. Not as many options in Toys as the other players.

Hush Babies

Let Baby Play : Seems like a relatively new website, might have started in June 2011. Nice range of toys. I appreciate the Home Safety Section that not many such websites offer. They give discounts on many big brands like Mee Mee, Chicco, etc. Diapers are also on discount, but they have very less options. Most of the categories do not offer too many products. There are no clothes in clothing section. But I’ll give it a benefit of doubt as it’s new and aims to grow.

Let Baby Play

In today’s busy world time is something that no one has. I surely wish that this segment grows and helps young and expecting parents in getting all the options under one roof. This way we can reserve our time and energy for the little ones. Getting discounts on branded (on non-branded) products would add icing to the cake

These browser generally follow certain standards to render your web pages but there are few things which they do differently or because of some thing handled in some specific way, it may behave differently on different platform. In result, you may want to tweak your pages accordingly, so that your page should display correctly on all the platform and all the browsers.

Here I am trying list all the properties which can be retrieved using JavaScript and can be used for making decision which page tweak to choose according to the browser and platform or any other property:

 
function showNavigatorProperties(){
	var navigatorDetails = '';
	navigatorDetails += 'App Code Name : ' + navigator.appCodeName + '<br/>';
	navigatorDetails += 'App Name : ' + navigator.appName + '<br/>';
	navigatorDetails += 'App Version : ' + navigator.appVersion + '<br/>';
	navigatorDetails += 'Cookie Enabled : ' + navigator.cookieEnabled + '<br/>';
	navigatorDetails += 'Language : ' + navigator.language + '<br/>';
	navigatorDetails += 'Platform : ' + navigator.platform + '<br/>';
	navigatorDetails += 'User Agent : ' + navigator.userAgent + '<br/>';
 
	var detailsDiv = document.getElementById("navigatordetails");
	detailsDiv.innerHTML = navigatorDetails;
}
 

 
<body onload="javascript:showNavigatorProperties();">
<div id="navigatordetails" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif;"></div>
</body>
 

Below is the execution of code above and you can see some of the information about your browser and platform:

This information can also be used for reading the language information and redirecting to appropriate page accordingly.

LAMP is Linux-Apache-MySql-Php but the people who works on Windows environment needs similar environment for development and unit-testing. There are very few behavior differences in windows environment but still it is useful to have this environment to check things locally on your machine if you only have Windows operating system on you machine.

There are various packages which sets the complete environment by just installing it and there are enough document resources following which you can set the environment yourself also. These packages are generally called WAMPs where W stands for Windows and rest of the word stands for Apache-Mysql-PHP.

1. Xampp: Packaged by Apache friends and available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. Windows version workes for Windows 98, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Vista.

Other than Apache-MySql-PHP there are various utility packages attached with it which makes this packages very useful. These utils are following:

Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v3.32, Ming, JpGraph, FileZilla FTP Server, mcrypt, eAccelerator, SQLite, and WEB-DAV + mod_auth_mysql etc.

2. WAMP : WAMP package is only for Windows and also contain some of the addons like SQLLiteManager and phpMyAdmin.

3. Setting Apache-Mysql-PHP on Vista (VAMP):You can either use xampp for setting your environment on vista or use the step-by-step instructions to set up environment . You can get complete instructions at http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Apache/Creating-a-VAMP-Vista-Apache-MySQL-PHP-Setup/.

There are many more other packages as well for setting it up all and you can check them all in a comparison table at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_WAMPs

There may be some discrepancies with actual LAMP and WAMPs environments but it is really useful setup to develop applications and test them.