8/14/2019 Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Juanjo Bazn

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Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Juanjo BaznPublished on April 11, 2008 by dean

In this weeks FiveRuns Rails TakeFive interview, we keep our globaltheme going, this time moving to Spain. Juanjo Bazn is a notedfreelance software consultant, speaker, and university professor basedin Madrid. He discovered Ruby a couple of years ago coming from the

Java world, and since then hes being working fulltime with Rails inSpain and with startups in Europe. Additionally, he helps organize theannual Spanish Ruby and Rails Conference and is a co-founder of theMadrid Ruby User Group.

FiveRuns: Welcome Juanjo. Lets start by talking about where you gofor Rails-related news and insight any particular website, blogs,forums, etc. that are of particular value?

Juanjo Bazn: I try to stay updated with changes on Rails Edge so apart from the rails-core list, I findreally helpful blogs like Ryans 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 planetslike 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 brotherBit 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 Bazn: Actually Id say Rails was the killer app for Ruby, and now I see Rails being so widelyused that I dont really think Rails needs or is waiting for a killer app. Projects like Twitter or Github aregreat, 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 Railsproject, I would mention Passenger , the mod_rails developed by Phusion . Deployment is one of thefacets of Rails with biggest room for improvement and one of the key issues that really helps to theadoption of Rails.

If Passenger results in the robust and ultra-simple way of deploying it promises, I think we could see anexponential 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 Railsuser group specifically. Tell us a little about the Spanish Ruby on Rails community, what you love aboutit, how it is grown, and what challenges the group sees ahead of itself, in both the near and long term.

Juanjo Bazn: 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 thecreation of groups in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Girona and Seville, to name a few.

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

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8/14/2019 Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Juanjo Bazn

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8/1/08 11:13 Aails TakeFive: Five Questions with Juanjo Bazn

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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 Bazn: I just got a copy of OReillys The Ruby Programming Language by D. Flanagan and Matz.Its a great book both for programmers discovering Ruby and for more experienced Ruby programmers.Im finding it really complete and educational.

Regarding books more focused on Rails, I would recommend Obie Fernandezs The Rails Way . It is agreat book to have near your computer when youre working. Also, Ruby for Rails by David Black is anice Ruby book for Rails-oriented developers.

FiveRuns: Charles Nutter recently said that Not liking JRuby because it is written in Java is like notliking 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 Rubys only real downside is its lethargic start-up time compared to MRI, do you agree?

Juanjo Bazn: The JRuby team is doing a great job (Ive just see them presenting the last version at theEuruko in Prague a couple of weeks ago and I enjoyed seeing things like easy use of Swing Java classesfrom Ruby), and I think their biggest challenge is simply staying at that level. As long as they keep pacewith the current Ruby versions and make any Rails app easily deployable, JRuby will continue goingforward.

Every new version is much faster than the previous one, but I dont think the main goal of JRuby is tocompete in speed with other Ruby implementations. I prefer to see JRuby as a great way to deploy Rubyapplications 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 Rubymodules for existing Java apps. And of course, it is a nice way to expose Java programmers to Rubycode and attract them to Ruby/Rails.

Juanjo Bazn 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 hes 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.

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Continued Discussion2 responses to this entry

What are your thoughts on Groovy and Grails? Especially coming from a Java background?

Ben said:on April 12, 2008 at 12:32 PM

Groovy is a good option for scripting on the JVM and its great integration with Java is a big pro. Imnot so sure about GoG, because now that you can use RoR on the JVM, why dont go with theoriginal? Well, probably if you need to integrate with Spring or Hibernate Grails fits better. Anyway isgreat to have one more choice both in dynlangs and in frameworks for the JVM.

Juanjo Bazn said:on April 14, 2008 at 01:30 PM