Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson

Mark: Okay, we’re dying for an inside scoop — can you give us any news about Rails 3? For instance, will Rails views support HTML 5 and CSS 3.x? Or anything new you can share? David: Rails really doesn’t say much about how you write your HTML or CSS. All we do is wrap a bunch of common HTML in helpers. You’re always free to add your own and write whatever HTML and CSS you please. But we are indeed targeting HTML5 for the scaffolding templates and looking to make nice helpers around things like the new video and audio tags. It’s an exciting time for web developers. The momentum behind HTML5 and CSS3.x is building every day. We’ll make sure that we’re right there with the best support that we can offer. Mark: Can you give us any insight on where you see not only Rails, but web development in general, going in the next five years? David: I try not to engage in too much rubbing of the crystal ball. Especially when it comes to making long-term predictions. But considering that the basic building blocks of the web five years ago were HTML, CSS, and JS, I’ll use yesterday’s weather and predict that they’ll continue to be the dominating technologies for implementing web applications. I don’t have a lot of faith in vendor-driven alternatives like Silverlight or Flash. In fact, I think these vendor technologies will have even less relevance as the new revisions of HTML and CSS and the speed increases we’ve seen for JS continues to expand what’s possible to do with these tools. I don’t think most people will bother with Flash for video, for example, in a few years. HTML should obviously be able to handle that on its own. Mark: Is competition in the web development space ultimately good for Rails? What do you think is in competition to Rails and why? David: Competition that leads to innovation is always a great thing. Rails made a lot of people wake up to the fact that most web development environments were terrible. It’s great to see that many of these platforms have been making progress on digesting those ideals. I think the main competition for Rails is the status quo. People who have no interest in changing what they’ve been doing for years. Getting web developers to move on from antiquated technologies should be the mission for all the next-generation frameworks and libraries currently eyeing competition amongst themselves. We have much more to gain from increasing the size of the pie than from haggling over the crumbs that are up for grabs. Mark: What do you think about Microsoft and ASP.net jumping on the MVC bandwagon and do you think Rails’ success prompted their adoption? David: Microsoft is late to the party as usual, but they can afford to be. Or at least they used to be able to afford it. Lots of places are so locked in to Microsoft technologies that they don’t even look at anything else. It’s good that these people are now finally being exposed to some of the ideas the open source world have been enjoying for a long time. I absolutely think that Microsoft was acting reactionary. Not just to Rails but to many of the other modern platforms that are intent on improving life for developers. Mark: What do you see as the second-best web development framework? David: I don’t use anything but Rails for actual development, so I’m not properly equipped to answer that. But I like what both Django and Seaside are doing. Mark: Can you share your thoughts on getting Rails into ‘enterprise’ environments, specifically large, old guard organizations that are intimately tied to Microsoft? Moreover, is Rails ready for the enterprise? David: I think this question is a few years stale. Rails is already deep inside tons of enterprise environments. I’ve found that the most important parameter for this penetration is just time. If you are big, old, stodgy organization, you’re simply not capable (or interested) in being at the cutting edge. So anything that doesn’t have a year long history behind it rarely gets considered. Thankfully, we’re finally getting there with Rails, so it’s getting easier for people every day. Mark: Are you currently writing any books? Or planning to in the near future? David: I actually just finished the manuscript on a new book called Rework that’ll be published in spring next year. I wrote along with Jason Fried and Matt Linderman from 37signals. It’s a more general, updated, awesome version of our previous book on starting a web business called Getting Real. Mighty excited about that! Mark: Where is 37signals headed? Any new products on the horizon? Or any new technologies/frameworks brewing or being extracted from your projects? David: We just announced that we’ve been working on a big integration project for quite a while called 37signals Accounts. Single sign-on, integration, suites, and all that good jazz. We also have a variety of internal exploration projects that we’re not ready to talk about yet. But I’m sure we’ll be able to extract some good stuff from that. Real-time updates is one of the things we’ve been playing with that’s pretty exciting. Mark: Are you involved with anything outside of 37signals and Rails—any side commercial or open source projects, maybe? David: I have my hands plenty full running 37signals, being involved with Rails, and carrying a functional social life on the side. Mark: And finally, our readers are dying to know — pirates or ninjas? David: Pirates, obviously.

2009-08-30T03:27:45Z

http://railsmagazine.com/forums/2/topics/70

5 Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson

2009-12-24T20:51:56Z