PONS.eu: the best of both worlds

PONS GmbH, Stuttgart, is a leader in both German dictionary publishing and in marketing language-learning products and services. Since 2000, PONS has relied on finnlabs’ technology for all their online dictionaries and web-based language services.

finnlabs’ newest product is the multi-language dictionary platform PONS.eu. We enriched and integrated the renowned quality print content into a high-performance web application, designed to serve millions of queries a day. The system scales with demand, insuring PONS against future IT expenses, and revenues from higher popularity of its services are not eaten up by exploding service costs.

PONS.eu encourages users to contribute their own content. Utilising the potential of the web’s crowd intelligence is a bold step not yet taken by other established publishing houses.

The system’s key technical feature is its combination of the strengths of different programming languages. Components which require high performance, like the sophisticated dictionary search, are written in Java. This gives the system high speed and a low computing footprint. Services with more extensive functions but fewer performance requirements are written in Ruby, capitalising on its low development costs. finnlabs uses JRuby to seamlessly integrate these two different programming languages. PONS.eu has helped establish finnlabs’ reputation for running one of the first high-performance web services based on JRuby world-wide.