Posted by tobi February 07, 2008 @ 06:04 PM
Heroku is a rails platform with a twist: it all runs in your browser.
The entire platform is build around a web based IDE which allows full rails development and deployment. Your apps are deployed to Amazon’s Elastic Cloud by the push of a button.
Ruby on Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals,
then extended and improved by a core team of committers and hundreds of open-source contributors.
Rails is released under the MIT license. Ruby under the Ruby License.
"Rails", "Ruby on Rails", and the Rails logo are trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson. All rights reserved.
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Um, holy crap? That thing is sort of mind blowing. This really feels like some sort of milestone in web development. I would love to see other non web-based editors integrate with a rails host environment in exactly this way. Could TextMate be made to do this, for example?
I just played with it a few minutes ago. It’s pretty cool. Just the fact that you don’t have to worry about deployment configurations makes this a great tool.
I’m not gonna lie, this looks pretty amazing. I signed up for the beta list.
This does look very cool, but I’m wondering what the advantage would be over using EC2 directly?
I don’t imagine any serious Rails developers will switch to a web-based IDE. So without that, whats left?
Is there any information about the EC2 integration as to if they will use my amazon account? As soon as I would not need to start my own full EC2 machine – which is quite expensive compared to other dedicated servers – it would be cool to have a scalable solution and pay per cpu usage or something.
It’s hella cool. (Stop saying “hella,” Cartman!) A nice RSpeckly config by default, a well-chosen database, easy “deployment” (almost like publishing, really).
This is pretty damm cool. But it’s quite a task to replace TextMate The Terminal and Subversion in the browser. (Off-cause with this you don’t need subversion.) quite an accomplishment if they pull it off..And a good compliment to something like http://www.speedyrails.com where you checkout a fully working site in svn and can start coding right away. No installation required. With Speedyrails you have all the power of you local apps and svn for collaboration. With Heroku I guess you can work from any computer in the world.
This is pretty damm cool. But it’s quite a task to replace TextMate The Terminal and Subversion in the browser. (Off-cause with this you don’t need subversion.) quite an accomplishment if they pull it off..And a good compliment to something like http://www.speedyrails.com where you checkout a fully working site in svn and can start coding right away. No installation required. With Speedyrails you have all the power of you local apps and svn for collaboration. With Heroku I guess you can work from any computer in the world.
@Matt
Shoot me an email at info@schreiblogade.de and I will send you an invite.
Call it “RoR.com Heroku Invite”.
Greetings
This concept is truly amazing! I love the idea of being able to code from any computer in the world.
It also saves the pain of having to set up a development environment if you want to set up a new computer to develop rails on (especially if it’s not an OS you’ve done it before on!).
My only concerns are
1) How much control you would have over deployment.
2) How safe is my code?
3) The editor wont have all the useful features of Textmate/Netbeans.
... but it still looks mighty impressive!
I love the idea and they made it real well enough. I think it’s kinda revolution. Certainly a major kickass has come.
Looks crazy and cool, especially if import and export work painless.
Can anyone invite me?
This is the type of thing I was expecting out of 37signals when there were rumors last year of a partnership with Jeff Bezos.
Super cool stuff, so… how much is it?
@Ric:
You can import or export a source tarball at any time, which gets at the code safety issue.
Deployment is not as fine-grained as, say, Capistrano, but I’ll bet you could do something clever with a pair of Heroku apps
- one public and one private -and the import/export feature.Nice job. But as you can see it’s not Rails 2.0.2!
Nice timing! I interviewed the Heroku founders in San Francisco and just posted the interview:
http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/heroku
It looks kind of interesting, but what real problem does it solve? There doesn’t seem to be a problem developing with a desktop text editor with command line and subversion… is it the easy deployment? Of course there’s Capistrano for that too. I guess I just don’t understand the purpose of this.
I absolutely love the Heroku interface. I tried several IDEs and never found one that meshed with RoR seamlessly. Not only does this do that beautifully, it is available no matter where I happen to be. FTP access would be nice, but the editor handles uploads gracefully and tarballs are easily uploaded and extracted anywhere. If nothing else I would default to it just for a total, all inclusive RoR IDE. I don’t know of any others which include so much in an environment which is so highly available. Overall my experience with Heroku has been nothing but a pleasure and support couldn’t be better. The blog states that we’re only seeing the very tip of the iceberg in regards to features. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.
I agree with Jeff. I do not understand what problem this solves. I’m guessing this is to impress the kiddies out there.
Jeff & Kibbles,
It’s not something that can be easily appreciated until you give it some time to set in… kinda like a mac. (I’ve introduced many ppl to mac and usually their first reaction is: “cool… looks nice” but in reality that’s just tip of the iceberg.
If you guys need an invite, email me at melvinatvolcanicmarketingcom with subject of “Heroku Invite, please, oh pretty please” =D
~ mel
I’ve been using heroku since december, it’s really quite impressive!
If anyone needs an invite, shoot me a gmail.
@4(Mark): The advantage is you don’t have to pay for an instance directly, Heroku uses what they’ve termed ‘liquid’ scaling to bring more EC2 instances online when traffic spikes and shut them back off when the traffic dies down.
@5(Mario): No, you don’t need an AWS/EC2 account to use heroku.
@13(dude): No pricing has been announced yet. It’s still totally free as of right now, but that will change.
@15(peanut): Funny, my heroku app’s running on rails 2.0.2 right now: RAILS_GEM_VERSION = ‘2.0.2’
— The Firefox-IDE works exceptionally well, as I have at least 5 PCs running all combinations of OSX, XP, Vista, and Ubuntu, and Heroku works seamlessly no matter what system I’m in front of, as long as I have firefox.
Heroku also just gained a new google group! Visit it here: http://groups.google.com/group/heroku
Heroku sounds really cool and reading through the features list makes my ~3 day wait on the limited beta list even more painful. Could somebody send me an invitation? My e-mail is: piinatturellu@gmail.com Thanks, I’d really appreciate it.
Jeff & Kibbles,
it is not the “I can develop my rails app in the browser”-thing, which makes Heroku so interesting. You can just upload your app as well.
The nice thing is, it makes deploying a whole site on Amazon AWS/EC2 a snap. And Amazon AWS/EC2 is definitly the most interesting hosting solution, which is currently available on this planet, when you think of a webapp, which needs a couple of servers to scale at any time. But it is not so easy to deal with, when you want to run a ruby on rails app, which depends on a SQL database, since Amazon sees the EC2 not as a place to store data but only as a way to provide compute power.
So Heroku provides a nice service, which lets you concentrate on developing your webapp and let them do the hosting for you. And it is up to you, whether you use the browser or your favourite editor to do it.
What I have not found out is, what they will charge you at the end, since Amazon will definitly charge them.
Thomas
I signed up for the beta list a few days ago – but nothing yet. If anyone has any spare invites – please send me one to heroku @ steve . dalts . com Thanks
It’s a good idea until the server slows to a crawl and your stuck and can’t do anything.
Any one use Heroku to develop OpenSocial Container…we are planing, would appreciate some suggestion.
Brilliant for starting work on new apps from scratch, but unfortunately if you have an existing app you would like to transfer, moving the contents of the database across (not just the schema) is painful unless you are already using PostGreSQL as your db.
Despite Rails’ aim to be database independent in theory, in practice this doesn’t happen so well.
I’m guessing there will be a plenty more of innovative deployments that will sprout whether browser-based or just an ‘upload apps’ thing.
But surely, ‘pricing’ will definitely be a major factor. So do check out http://Morphexchange.com/map_info
Pax
Heroku sounds cool in theory but I keep having different problems with it. Support is hard to come by. Have not been able to run or deploy anything yet.
It is black I assumed pruning rich flavor.
Few days ago I started using Gliffy www.gliffy.com a online diagramming software, with witch you can easily create professional-looking flowcharts, diagrams(ER + UML), floor plans, technical drawings and more. It allows easy collaboration too. I taught hym… it would be not so long and I will use an web app as my IDE or editor for app development. And I see i can try this out already.