FiveRuns Blog

In this week’s FiveRuns Rails TakeFive interview, we keep our global theme going, this time moving to Spain. Juanjo Bazán is a noted freelance software consultant, speaker, and university professor based in Madrid. He discovered Ruby a couple of years ago coming from the Java world, and since then he’s being working fulltime with Rails in Spain and with startups in Europe. Additionally, he helps organize the annual Spanish Ruby and Rails Conference and is a co-founder of the Madrid Ruby User Group.

FiveRuns: Welcome Juanjo. Let’s start by talking about where you go for Rails-related news and insight – any particular website, blogs, forums, etc. that are of particular value?

Juanjo Bazán: I try to stay updated with changes on Rails Edge so apart from the rails-core list, I find really helpful blogs like Ryan’s Scraps and Redemption in a blog.

For more general Ruby/Rails news, I use sites like Ruby Inside or the more noisy but also useful planets like Ruby Corner among others. I also check often both PeepCode and Railscasts for nice tutorials.

Last but not least a great programming-related Spanish blog: Putting it together, and its twitter brother Bit by bit.

FiveRuns: Is Rails still waiting for its killer app, or are we already there with Basecamp, Highrise, Twitter, Hulu, Revolution Health, etc.?

Juanjo Bazán: Actually I’d say Rails was the killer app for Ruby, and now I see Rails being so widely used that I don’t really think Rails needs or is waiting for a killer app. Projects like Twitter or Github are great, cool, popular and prove the potential of Rails.

Maybe the killer-app effect will come from the deployment side, and although it is not properly a Rails project, I would mention Passenger, the mod_rails developed by Phusion. Deployment is one of the facets of Rails with biggest room for improvement and one of the key issues that really helps to the adoption of Rails.

If Passenger results in the robust and ultra-simple way of deploying it promises, I think we could see an exponential increment of hosting providers offering Rails. That would be great for everyone.

FiveRuns: There was a great article recently on the Rails community in Austin and the Austin on Rails user group specifically. Tell us a little about the Spanish Ruby on Rails community, what you love about it, how it is grown, and what challenges the group sees ahead of itself, in both the near and long term.

Juanjo Bazán: In Spain there is a big and active Rails community. I think we have a nice environment of startups, freelancers and companies working exclusively with Ruby on Rails and that helps to the creation of groups in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Girona and Seville, to name a few.

I’m part of the organization of the Spanish Rails Conference, a friendly annual community-based meeting where about 300 developers join in Madrid for a couple of days to learn from each other. So the main challenge probably is to continue growing numbers while trying to keep the open community spirit.

Another natural step would be to interact some more with other European Ruby/Rails communities. Currently we are trying to organize and host the next European Ruby Conference in Barcelona.

FiveRuns: What is the best Ruby and/or Rails book that you have read recently?

Juanjo Bazán: I just got a copy of O’Reilly’s The Ruby Programming Language by D. Flanagan and Matz. It’s a great book both for programmers discovering Ruby and for more experienced Ruby programmers. I’m finding it really complete and educational.

Regarding books more focused on Rails, I would recommend Obie Fernandez’s The Rails Way. It is a great book to have near your computer when you’re working. Also, Ruby for Rails by David Black is a nice Ruby book for Rails-oriented developers.

FiveRuns: Charles Nutter recently said that “Not liking JRuby because it is written in Java is like not liking Ruby because it is written in C.” That objection put aside, what is the single greatest challenge for JRuby going forward? Peter Cooper has suggested that Ruby’s only real downside is its lethargic start-up time compared to MRI, do you agree?

Juanjo Bazán: The JRuby team is doing a great job (I’ve just see them presenting the last version at the Euruko in Prague a couple of weeks ago and I enjoyed seeing things like easy use of Swing Java classes from Ruby), and I think their biggest challenge is simply staying at that level. As long as they keep pace with the current Ruby versions and make any Rails app easily deployable, JRuby will continue going forward.

Every new version is much faster than the previous one, but I don’t think the main goal of JRuby is to compete in speed with other Ruby implementations. I prefer to see JRuby as a great way to deploy Ruby applications on enterprise environments. Java is already there and structural changes are often rejected, so the JVM is a good backdoor. Being able to use Java inside Ruby classes is very useful to code Ruby modules for existing Java apps. And of course, it is a nice way to expose Java programmers to Ruby code and attract them to Ruby/Rails.

Juanjo Bazán is a freelance software consultant and a university professor based in Madrid, Spain. He discovered Ruby a couple of years ago coming from the Java world, and since then he’s being working fulltime with rails for different spanish companies like Cafelink or ASPGems while being involved in different european Rails-based startups like Tractis or Palabea. He holds a MS in Computer Science and is finishing a PhD in Computational Astrophysics. In addition to being a Rails developer, contributor and speaker he is member of the organization of the annual Spanish Ruby and Rails Conference and co-founder of the Madrid Ruby User Group. As soon as he has something interesting to say, he promises to restart his blog.