Padrino: a Ruby framework built upon Sinatra

From the Padrino’s site:

Padrino is a ruby framework built upon the excellent Sinatra Microframework. Sinatra is a DSL for creating simple web applications in Ruby with speed and minimal effort. This framework makes it as fun and easy as possible to code increasingly advanced web applications by expanding upon Sinatra while maintaining the spirit that made it great.

The Ruby community has plenty of web frameworks at this point. Padrino — self-described as “The Elegant Ruby Web Framework” — is interesting because it’s built on top of Sinatra, it’s highly modular, quite fast, and provides a drop-in admin interface. It fits between Sinatra and a large framework like Rails.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Rails 3 is about to be released, Padrino may have had a fighting chance at acquiring a good market share within the Ruby community. Rails 3 is here though, and it too is very modular and fast. Plus, it’s hard to beat the huge ecosystem that’s already built around it.

That said, the presence of an admin interface, a la Django, and the Sinatra core are definitely inviting features. Check out their documentation and screencast, to see if you think it’s worth considering for your own web development needs.

Upgrading to Rails 3

Rails 3 is a major upgrade; using it almost feels like working with an entirely new framework. Porting existing applications and acquiring the skills required to build new ones entails a significant amount of effort. You could scout the net for bits and pieces of information, but that would be time consuming and possibly frustrating. Thankfully there are resources available that have done the work for you, so you don’t have to waste time trying to figure out what’s new.

In this post, I’d like to point out a couple of resources that I think compliment each other well, and focus on how to upgrade applications, as opposed to simply providing you with a shopping list of features.

The first one is Upgrading applications to Rails 3, a screencast that was just released by ThinkCode.TV. This screencast is almost an hour-long and shows you how to port a real world web application from Rails 2 to Rails 3. As such, it can be very useful if you have existing code that you’d like to port over to Rails 3. The author ported a few large applications to Rails 3, as he has solid experience with it. I’m biased of course, but I feel it’s well worth $8.99. (Today only, use the coupon RAILS3 to purchase this Rails screencast for just $5.99.)

The second resource is the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook by Jeremy McAnally. It’s a beautiful PDF that succinctly explains what’s new in Rails 3, as well as how to upgrade your applications to the new edition of the framework. At 10c per page ($12 for 120 pages), it too is worth the money in my opinion.

Regardless of whether you end up buying these resources or not, I sure hope you have extensive test coverage for your existing Rails 2 applications. In my experience this is a must, because porting complex applications to Rails 3 without solid test support is a definite challenge. Nevertheless, I feel that this major upgrade is truly worth it. Rails 3 really brings Rails to a whole new level and we, as a community, should be proud and excited about what lies ahead of us.

IBM_DB 2.5.0 with support for Rails 3 is out

This is a tiny post to let you know that IBM just released version 2.5.0 of the IBM_DB gem with support for the upcoming Rails 3. That’s what I call both proactive and a true testament of IBM’s commitment towards DB2 on Rails.

Aside from providing a working adapter and driver before the new framework release is even out, this release has a few improvements and fixes, such as getting rid of a minor bug related to prepared statements and has_many associations.

Finally, ibm_db 2.5 improves upon Unicode integration with support for any encoding format that’s permitted by Ruby 1.9.

Rails, DB2 and the Enterprise

Recently Matt Aimonetti wrote an insightful article about Rails and the Enterprise. In it he identifies five core Enterprise application needs:

• Reliability
• Support
• Performance
• Advantage over the competition
• Integration and transition path

Matt then proceeds to illustrate how Rails does a good job in regards to most of these points, despite a few existing challenges.

Among these challenges, I can clearly see the following:

• There isn’t a 1-800-RAILS number; the community may be great, but there are not exactly yearly contracts in place. Furthermore, the author of the Ruby driver for, say, Oracle doesn’t owe you a thing. He may or may not be there for you when you need something to be fixed quickly.

• XML support is less than ideal (but it is improving).

• Integration with the Enterprise world is not easy, due in part to less than stellar SOAP support (but that is also improving).

• If you’re taking advantage of ActiveRecord and an Enterprise database like Oracle, your DBA isn’t likely to be happy that you aren’t using prepared statements.

You may think these are small points, and in the startup world they generally are. However, in the Enterprise world they do make the difference between adoption and niche.

One thing that Matt forgot to mention is DB2, which should be the poster child for how Rails can be Enterprise ready. And as a bonus, you get to throw around IBM’s name (which is synonymous with Enterprise) because Rails is both supported by, and used within, IBM.

Let’s address each point above with DB2 on Rails in mind.

IBM is the only database vendor to provide a Ruby driver and ActiveRecord/Rails adapter for its databases. This means that you have a team that’s accountable when things don’t work as they’re supposed to. This team is accountable, regardless of whether you have a contract with IBM or not; it’s their job, not a hobby. This involvement with Rails dates back to 2006, with continuing releases and improvements ever since. Our IBM’s optional yearly 24/7 support contracts (e.g., for less than $3000 a year per server with DB2 Express-C) include support for DB2 on Rails as well.

DB2 supports native storage and querying of XML documents and data (plus it’s fast). This technology is known as pureXML.

DB2 can both consume and serve SOAP web services. This lets DB2 do the integration for you.

DB2 on Rails supports parameterized queries. (While on the subject of queries, if you are using JRuby you can take advantage of pureQuery, which is an IBM created Enterprise solution that’s aimed at making your queries fast, reliable, manageable and easy to debug.)

If you are trying to introduce Rails into your Enterprise job, chances are that DB2 will already be present within the company infrastructure. If not, you can use DB2 Express-C which is entirely free — thus making it easier to introduce than an expensive solution.

IBM is one of the most trusted brands on the market today, as it has been for decades now. Banks and Enterprise companies the world over trust DB2 with their most critical data. One way for the Rails community to increase the adoption of Rails in the Enterprise, is to acknowledge and embrace the great pair that is Rails and DB2.

DB2 support for Ruby/Rails turns 2.0

The API development team just released a major version of the ibm_db gem. Detailed installation instructions are available on RubyForge (PDF). Among several improvements, there are three particularly newsworthy features:

1. Support for Ruby 1.9;
2. Support for mingw32, used by the latest version of the Ruby installer for Windows;;
3. Performance and security enhancements through “automatic” parameterized queries.

As we approach the release of Rails 3, supporting Ruby 1.9 is becoming more of a necessity. Likewise, the so called “One-Click installer” on Windows has been replaced by a current project that uses mingw32, which offers a much needed performance boost on Windows. Having a mingw32 compatible gem is starting to become a requirement for many of our Windows users.

Finally, DB2 is now the only database that supports prepared statements in ActiveRecord (without changing any of the application’s code). This has important performance benefits, as I explained in my article Improve the security and performance of DB2 Ruby on Rails applications using parameterized queries, which was published today by developerWorks.

Setup Ruby Enterprise Edition, nginx and Passenger (aka mod_rails) on Ubuntu

The following is a very short guide on setting up Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE), nginx and Passenger, for serving Ruby on Rails applications on Ubuntu. It also includes a few quick and easy optimization tips.

We start with setting up REE (x64), using the .deb file provided by Phusion:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/66163/ruby-enterprise_1.8.7-2009.10_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i ruby-enterprise_1.8.7-2009.10_amd64.deb
ruby -v

In output you should see “ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174)…” or similar. If this is the case, good; while you are there, update RubyGems and the installed gems:

sudo gem update --system
sudo gem update

Next, you’ll need to install nginx, which is a really fast web server. The Phusion team has made it very easy to install, but if you simply follow most instructions found elsewhere, you’ll get the following error:

checking for system md library ... not found
checking for system md5 library ... not found
checking for OpenSSL md5 crypto library ... not found

./configure: error: the HTTP cache module requires md5 functions
from OpenSSL library.  You can either disable the module by using
--without-http-cache option, or install the OpenSSL library in the
system,
or build the OpenSSL library statically from the source with nginx by
using
--with-http_ssl_module --with-openssl=
 options.

Instead, we are going to install libssl-dev first and then nginx and its Passenger module:

sudo aptitude install libssl-dev
sudo passenger-install-nginx-module

Follow the prompt and accept all the defaults (when prompted to chose between 1 and 2, pick 1).

Before I proceed with the configuration, I like to create an init script and have it boot at startup (the script itself is adapted from one provided by the excellent articles at slicehost.com):

sudo vim /etc/init.d/nginx

The content of which needs to be:

#! /bin/sh

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          nginx
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:     $all
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts the nginx web server
# Description:       starts nginx using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO

PATH=/opt/nginx/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/opt/nginx/sbin/nginx
NAME=nginx
DESC=nginx

test -x $DAEMON || exit 0

# Include nginx defaults if available
if [ -f /etc/default/nginx ] ; then
    . /etc/default/nginx
fi

set -e

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

case "$1" in
  start)
    echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
    start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /opt/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
        --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
    echo "$NAME."
    ;;
  stop)
    echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
    start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /opt/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
        --exec $DAEMON || true
    echo "$NAME."
    ;;
  restart|force-reload)
    echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
    start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile \
        /opt/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON || true
    sleep 1
    start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile \
        /opt/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
    echo "$NAME."
    ;;
  reload)
      echo -n "Reloading $DESC configuration: "
      start-stop-daemon --stop --signal HUP --quiet --pidfile /opt/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
          --exec $DAEMON || true
      echo "$NAME."
      ;;
  status)
      status_of_proc -p /opt/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid "$DAEMON" nginx && exit 0 || exit $?
      ;;
  *)
    N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
    echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload|status}" >&2
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0

Change its permission and have it startup at boot:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx
sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f nginx defaults

From now on, you’ll be able to start, stop and restart nginx with it. Start the server as follows:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start

Heading over to your server IP with your browser, you should see “Welcome to nginx!”. If you do, great, we can move on with the configuration of nginx for your Rails app.

Edit nginx’ configuration file:

sudo vim /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

Adding a server section within the http section, as follows:

    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name example.com;
        root /somewhere/my_rails_app/public;
        passenger_enabled on;
        rails_spawn_method smart;
    }

The server name can also be a subdomain if you wish (e.g., blog.example.com). It’s important that you point the root to your Rails’ app public directory.

The rails_spawn_method directive is very efficient, allowing Passenger to consume less memory per process and speed up the spawning process, whenever your Rails application is not affected by its limitations (for a discussion about this you can read the proper section in the official guide).

If you have lots of RAM (e.g., more than 512 MB) on your server, you may want to consider increasing you maximum pool size, with the directive passenger_max_pool_size from its default size of 6. Conversely, if you want to limit the number of processes running at any time and consume less memory on a small VPS (e.g., 128 to 256MB), you can decrease that number down to 2 (or something in that range). (Always test a bunch of configurations to find one that works for you). You can read more about this directive, in the official guide.

While you are modifying nginx’ configuration, you may also want to increase the worker processes (e.g., to 4, on a typical VPS) and add a few more tweaks (such as enabling gzip compression):

# ...
http {
    passenger_root /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5;
    passenger_ruby /usr/local/bin/ruby;

    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    access_log  logs/access.log;

    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    tcp_nodelay on;

    gzip on;
    gzip_comp_level 2;
    gzip_proxied any;   

    server {
    #...

When you are happy with the changes, save the file, and restart nginx:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

If you wish to restart Passenger in the future, without having to restart the whole web server, you can simply run the following command:

touch /somewhere/my_rails_app/tmp/restart.txt

Passenger also provides a few handy monitoring tools. Check them out:

sudo passenger-status
sudo passenger-memory-stats

That’s it, you are ready to go! I hope that you find these few notes useful.

Installing the Ruby driver for DB2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Now that Mac OS X 10.6 is out, it’s time to leave the world of 32 bit computing behind. The pre-installed Ruby interpreter will run in 64 bit mode by default, so you may need to pay attention when installing some C-based gems. The ibm_db Ruby gem for DB2 can easily be installed or updated to the latest available version by following these simple steps:

$ sudo -s
$ export IBM_DB_LIB=/Users/<username>/sqllib/lib64
$ export IBM_DB_INCLUDE=/Users/<username>/sqllib/include
$ export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"
$ gem install ibm_db

You can verify that the installation was successful my running the following:

$ irb
>> require 'ibm_db.bundle'
=> true

Please let me know if you encounter any issues, I’d be glad to help you.

Recommended Ruby and Rails books (August 2009)

I finally got around to updating the Ruby and Rails book pages. The existing list was getting a bit obsolete and I didn’t like the idea of recommending old books to newcomers. I also had some interesting new entries.

Without further ado:

• Recommended Ruby Books
• Recommended Rails Books

A few people may disagree with the choices, but I think most experienced Ruby and Rails programmers, who’ve read those books, will concur with my recommendations. I’m quite confident that these are, all things considered, some of the best books available on the subject.

A word to the publishers

As tempting as it is to collect Ruby and Rails books, these days I don’t feel I can economically justify the act of purchasing every Ruby or Rails book put out there. So if you are a publisher or an author, and you’d like for me to consider your book, you are certainly welcome to send me a review copy. I will definitely read it, but only include it on these lists if it’s either outstanding or as good as the existing ones. If it’s a programming book that’s not related to Ruby/Rails, yet is really good, I would consider reviewing it on my blog.

On JRuby’s importance for the future of Ruby

In a recent blog entry, Charles Nutter argues about the importance of JRuby for Ruby’s adoption within the Enterprise. Or, in his own words:

The idea of “Enterprise Ruby” has become less repellant since Dave Thomas’s infamous keynote at RailsConf 2006. There are a lot of large, lumbering organizations out there that have yet to adopt any of the newer agile language/framework combinations, and Rails has most definitely led the way. I personally believe that in order for Ruby to become more than just a nice language with a great community, it needs to gain adoption in those organizations, and it needs to do it damn quickly. JRuby is by far the best way for that to happen.

He has a very good point. Working for IBM (it doesn’t get much more Enterprise than that) I can testify to the number of colleagues and partners who ask me questions like, “Can I interface Rails with Java?”, “Can I deploy it with WebSphere?” or “How can I generate a Rails WAR file?”. The answers to these and similar questions are all found in JRuby.

A couple of years ago I “toured” Canada, speaking at a few IBM, internal conferences. The vast majority of my attendees were experienced Java developers who were doing business consulting for IBM’s clients. They were all very enthusiastic about my presentation on Ruby and Rails. It was a break from J2EE’s complexity. These people were genuinely excited about the perspective of using Rails when doing client work.

Mid-conference, one attendant said to me, “This is cool, but they’ll never let us use this stuff”. And that’s when I reached for the JRuby slides. The mood in the room suddenly shifted. These developers started to think “OK, this could actually work”. At the end of my speech, most of the questions I received had to do with JRuby.

As I mentioned during that series of conferences “JRuby can be your gateway to introducing Rails into your workplace”. Many people within the Enterprise world don’t have an option. It’s either a JVM-based solution or they have to give up on Rails altogether.

JRuby is not only attractive to Ruby fans who’d like to use Ruby/Rails in certain work environments, it’s also appealing to those who are looking for an alternative to Java as a language. Here is where we could hit the jackpot in terms of Ruby’s adoption. There are countless Java programmers in the world. Convincing even just a fraction of them to switch would be enough to drastically increase the size of our community.

As Charles mentioned in his post, people can now pick between Scala, Clojure, Groovy, JRuby and Jython. I believe that the choice developers ultimately make boils down to three key usability aspects:

1. If I’m moving away from the complexity and limits of the Java programming language, I will most likely want to embrace something that is easy to use, yet also very powerful. JRuby, Jython and perhaps Groovy, have a major advantage in this regard. Most Java developers will find Scala and Clojure intimidating, in my opinion.
2. Java is one of the fastest languages out there. The speed of these implementations will have an impact on the sort of choice people ultimately end up making. Going from Java to JRuby can be a pretty dramatic decrease in speed. In this sense Scala has the upper hand. So I believe that continuing to improve JRuby’s performance will be key.
3. Java integration. How hard does this language make using libraries that I’m already used to? Are they easily wrapped or do I have to jump through hoops? I think JRuby does a pretty good job in this regard.

Charles’ team has been focusing on the right things. If I can be permitted one criticism though, it would be to avoid responding to every post that praises a competing implementation. Openly fighting against other implementations can backfire and looks unprofessional. I understand the desire to set the record straight and being competitive, but there is no reason to constantly point out that “these implementations are not done” every time an early project shows some form of promise or progress. Otherwise, it’s easy to come across as someone whose “heart turned black as coal, and who finds himself wishing bad luck towards other implementations”.

Today JRuby is an Enterprise-friendly alternative to Ruby MRI/KRI; and Charles is right, JRuby is important for Ruby’s future. It would however be wrong to assume that JRuby is the only sort of future for Ruby and that C/C++ based implementations are becoming irrelevant. Ruby has never been a zero-sum game. Plurality is a substantial part of what the Ruby ecosystem is all about.

Finally, let me conclude by congratulating the JRuby team, who have just been hired by Engine Yard. I think this could be a very strategic move for both JRuby and Engine Yard.

DB2 Express-C 9.7 and the Django adapter released

This is a great day for those of us who love DB2, as DB2 Express-C 9.7 has just been released. As mentioned before, this is the best DB2 ever, and an extremely important release.

To learn more about what’s new in this release, please check out the recording of our latest webinar:

If you run Linux, Unix or Windows, download it while it’s hot.

DB2 9.7 on the Cloud

Another great aspect of this release is that for the first time ever, DB2 has been released both as a product and as a deployment on the Cloud. If you pop over to RightScale, you can get a trial account for free and should see DB2 Express-C 9.7 on both CentOS and Ubuntu within the partner catalog. RightScale has been an amazing partner and they really do wonders to simplify Cloud Computing. In ten minutes time you can be up and running on the Cloud, thanks to the templates provided.

DB2 support for Django

But the good times don’t stop there, we are also announcing the first official release of the Django adapter for DB2. It sounded crazy when I first proposed the idea within IBM back in 2006, but now it’s a reality.

You can download the .tar.gz archive from the Google Code homepage for the project, or simply by clicking here. This version fully supports the Django 1.0.2 API. For instructions on how to install it, please read the Getting started with the IBM DB Django adapter guide. The current version supports DB2 for Linux, Unix, Windows and MAC OS X, version 8.2 or higher (9.5 FP2 or higher for MAC OS X). In the future, IBM Cloudscape, Apache Derby, Informix (IDS) and both System i & z/OS will be supported.

ibm_db gem updated to 1.1

I’ll conclude this DB2-centric post with a smaller, but still interesting announcement. The ibm_db gem has been updated to version 1.1. This release includes support for ActiveRecord’s QueryCache mechanism, enhanced support for BigInt (and BigSerial), support for rename_column (requires DB2 9.7), parametrization of the timestamp datatype (requires DB2 9.7), and a few fixes and performance enhancements as well. It is recommended that you upgrade to this version.

Do Androids Count Electric Sheep with DB2 or MySQL?

Counting rows is an ubiquitous operation on the web, so much so that it’s often overused. Regardless of misuse, there is no denying that the performance of counting operations has an impact on most applications. In this post I’ll discuss my findings about the performance of DB2 9.5 and MySQL 5.1 regarding counting records.

For those of you who are not into science fiction, let me clarify that the odd title of this post is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the great novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

I connected to the database, created the table, imported the data and benchmarked counting operations using ActiveRecord in a standalone script. Here is the code I used:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require "rubygems"
require "active_record"
require 'benchmark'

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  :adapter  => :mysql,
  :username => "myuser",
  :password => "mypass",
  :database => "mydb")

ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
  create_table :people, :force => true do |t|
    t.string :name, :null => false
    t.string :fbid, :null => false
    t.string :gender
    t.string :profession
  end
end

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
end

# This can be sped up by performing an import instead
Person.transaction do
  File.open("person.tsv").each_line do |line|
    line = line.split(/\t/)
    p = Person.new
    p.name = line[0]
    p.fbid = line[1]
    p.gender = line[6]
    p.profession = line[17]
    p.save!
  end
end

n = 100
Benchmark.bm(26) do |x|
  x.report("Count all:") { n.times { Person.count } }
  x.report("Count profession:") { n.times { Person.count(:profession) } }

  x.report("Count females:") do
    n.times { Person.count(:conditions => "gender = 'Female'") }
  end

  x.report("Count males w/ profession:") do
    n.times { Person.count(:profession, :conditions => "gender = 'Male'") }
  end
end

Please note that importing records in a huge transaction containing hundreds of thousands of INSERT operations is far from the most efficient way to import. Massive imports of data using the load/import facilities provided by each database is the way to go (also see the ar-extensions plugin). The lengthy import wasn’t benchmarked here though, so it isn’t determinant for this article.

people.tsv is a 92.7 MB tab separated values file that contains 875,857 records from the Freebase project (in my file I removed the header line, leaving only records).

For those who are not familiar with ActiveRecord, the queries executed behind the scenes are (in order):

SELECT count(*) AS count_all FROM people

SELECT count(people.profession) AS count_profession FROM people

SELECT count(*) AS count_all FROM people WHERE (gender = 'Female')

SELECT count(people.profession) AS count_profession FROM people WHERE (gender = 'Male')

While the table definition (for MySQL) is:

CREATE TABLE `people` (
	`id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL auto_increment PRIMARY KEY,
	`name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
	`fbid` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
	`gender` varchar(255),
	`profession` varchar(255)
) ENGINE=InnoDB

As easily verified by enabling logging with:

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

Without much further ado, here are the times I obtained on my last generation MacBook Pro 2.66 GHz with 4 GB DDR3 RAM, and 320 GB @ 7200 rpm hard disk, running Mac OS X Leopard:

MySQL:

  Count all:                  42.467522
  Count profession:           52.130935
  Count females:              54.575469
  Count males w/ profession:  64.046631

DB2:

  Count all:                  5.818485
  Count profession:           7.714391
  Count females:              8.556377
  Count males w/ profession:  9.656739

Or in graph form:

That’s an impressive difference. To be exact, in this example DB2 was between 6 and 7 times faster than MySQL. In the case of COUNT(*), DB2 counted almost a million records in 58 milliseconds, or in about the blink of an eye according to Wolfram Alpha.

For those who are skeptical, please note that DB2 was not manually fine-tuned in any way. The client codepage was set to 1252 to allow Greek letters, and the log size was increased to permit such a huge transaction during the import. That’s it, no optimizations were attempted. This is DB2 Express-C out of the box. It looks like smart androids count electric sheep with DB2 after all.

The advantages of DB2 over MySQL when dealing with a massive volume of traffic are well known (and not limited to performance either), but DB2 can dramatically improve performance even for your average web application. And DB2 9.7, which will be released this month, increases the performance and the ability to self-tune itself to the available resources and required workload even further. If you’d like to try DB2 Express-C for yourself, you can download it here. It doesn’t cost you a dime to obtain and can be used for development, testing and production absolutely free of charge.

Startup Interviews: Zooppa.com

What follows is an interview with Nicholas Wieland, CTO of Italy-based Zooppa, a fast growing social network for creative types. This is the second in a series of interviews I will carry out with interesting figures from the micro-ISV and startup scene. If you have a compelling story to tell, own or run a tech startup, and would like to be featured, please drop me a line via email.

1. I’d like to start by tracing your background. What did you do prior to Zooppa?

Programming, programming, programming. I started out working for Neato Europe as their “one-man-band programmer”, building their e-commerce site and taking care of their infrastructure (nothing more than a bunch of servers). In those days my love of FreeBSD, PostgreSQL and dynamic languages started to grow exponentially. As the only employee I had to find a way to produce quantity and quality at the same time, and the technologies above were a perfect fit for the job.

After leaving Neato I did consulting work for a few years, for customers like Monte dei Paschi di Siena and Italian Telecom. Albeit those are big names, it was with the smaller scale customers that I enjoyed working the most. I won’t mention them by name though as they don’t impress people as much as big banks. I used to work primarily with Python, while developing a growing interest in Ruby, which blossomed when Ruby on Rails was released.

In the meantime I was helping Marco Ceresa writing the first book in Italian about Ruby (thus cheating on Python officially for the first time) and working part-time for Assembla on their Hotchalk project.

2. What led to the creation of Zooppa and how did you become its CTO?

Zooppa came from an idea that Davide Lombardi, an Italian journalist, had to found a company with the help of Riccardo Donadon and his firm, H-Farm, an early stage startup incubator. I joined Zooppa almost by accident, having answered a job posting thinking that it was some kind of consulting position for RoR from a forward-thinking employer. I soon found myself talking with Riccardo and Peter Caiazzi (of Netscape fame) at a wonderful countryside farm, full of fellow geeks. I was immediately sold.

I was first hired as a consultant and a few months later become the CTO. I guess the reason is that I’m a good programmer. You should ask Riccardo.

3. Can you explain to our readers who may not familiar with it, what Zooppa is? (Think an elevator pitch.)

Zooppa is a web application for designers and other creative types. It’s based on a new approach to online advertising and on a value proposition that goes beyond the simple “click” formula. We give our users a brand that is looking for a commercial, they create ads through a competition (videos, print ads, radio commercials, banners or simply concepts), and these ads are voted on by the site’s community. Eventually the ad makers win money (I think we’ve awarded $400,000 to date) based on the popular vote and the choice of the customer who commissioned the project.

In my opinion it’s a wonderful way for people to show what they’re able to accomplish for companies like Google, Nike, TomTom and many others. And based on the number of people from our community who have been hired by these companies, it is clear that the companies agree as well.

4. What kind of funding did the company receive?

No funding other than that of H-Farm. I strongly believe that you need to have a product before you ask for funding. I’m absolutely against the “promise-based” economy we all know. We’re going to be looking for our first round of substantial funding very soon, as we’re now able to show our polished product and our large community (something we couldn’t do one year ago). We have been able to give Zooppa its own character and goals, and we proved that it worked. Now we are able to make promises that we can stand behind.

5. How are things going? At this stage have you been able to be profitable, and can you disclose a few statistics about Zooppa? How many employees, users, pageviews and so on?

No, we haven’t been profitable, but we’re getting very close. We are somewhat akin to a combination of YouTube, Flickr and Facebook (in the sense that we serve videos, images and have a timeline), and we had huge startup costs, so it was basically impossible to be profitable initially, which we knew from the get-go.

We have 40,000 users more or less, 12,000 print ads, 2,000 videos and so on. It’s quite impressive when you consider that these videos are the result of a creative process and not, say, simply the recording of your cat a la YouTube. In terms of employees, we’ve got about 20 people.

6. It seems to me that the idea is innovative, the videos are fun, and there is a solid business model behind it. Why do you think the company has received little attention outside of Europe, especially by specialized blogs that cover all kinds of startups? Can you tell us about your struggle to get exposure?

Oh well, you’re opening a can of worms with that question… We made a huge mistake at the beginning: we focused on our own market without “attacking” the US one. Other than that, we didn’t receive any coverage outside of Italy, even if I did all I could to reach out to the biggest blogs that cover startups. It seems to me that you only get coverage if you are burning VC money or in some way are doing something that’s fashionable at the moment (such as with Twitter right now).

I’ve even seen one of our clones getting more coverage than us, which is kind of ridiculous as that competitor implemented the idea horribly in my opinion. I would say that the originality of the idea doesn’t really matter to such bloggers, just the funding and related issues (not to mention the various possible conflicts of interest…). Honestly this is very hard to swallow.

7. How did choosing Ruby on Rails impact the project?

We are incredibly productive. We normally code a prototype and write specs before putting it online. This is awesome, I can turn ideas into code in no time, test and refactor them later if I realize that performances are not as I would like them to be.

I strongly believe we wouldn’t survive without Rails. I still remember the presentation I gave to RailsToItaly, I just had done a complete redesign and rewrite of the site in 38 days. My presentation’s title was “Productivity with RubyOnRails or how I stopped worrying and learned to love Zooppa”. I think this title speaks for itself.

On a side note, I would also like to say that as an old school web developer and early “Railer” (you can find my posts whining about DB serials stretching as far back as 2004 with answers from DHH himself ). I think we have the best provider ever. I work with EngineYard and their service is terrific. I have no idea how they can offer the sort of support they do and still keep prices so reasonable. Never in 10 years on the web have I experienced the type of service I get from EngineYard. They are one of our most precious assets.

8. As CTO for the company, what are your main duties?

I code like crazy, as I already mentioned, and I take care of our architecture and its evolution. I’m in charge of other developers (http://twitter.com/oscardelben/, http://twitter.com/michelegera and http://twitter.com/smash) and provide them with specs to implement. And I whine about everything. Whining is the defining skill of every CTO, trust me.

9. Where is Zooppa heading and what plans do you have to bring it to the next level?

I want to integrate Zooppa with the major video and image platforms. And with Twitter of course. I would also like to experiment with Sinatra for a Facebook application. As well I’m coding my own blog/static site solution with Sinatra and Metal (I really dislike WordPress). And I do so in my free time, which means BSD license all the way. I also plan to use CouchDB for our timeline.

We have a lot of stuff going, and we’re going to hire more employees, so feel free to send your CV to nwieland@zooppa.com, and be sure to include Erlang and Haskell if you are brave (I received complaints about my choice of technology, because it’s hard to find Ruby developers around here. If I start requiring Erlang and Haskell skills I will definitely establish a record number of complaints here in H-Farm). It’s going to be a lot of fun, really.

I really want to thank Nicholas for his time, and I invite my readers to stay tuned for more interviews. An Italian translation of this interview is available on Stacktrace.it.