Heroku: An Online Rails Development and App Hosting Environment
Martin Sadler of WorkingWithRails.com just pointed me towards Heroku, an exciting new development in the Rails world. Heroku is an online environment where you can develop and host Rails applications.. all from the browser. This is pretty exciting stuff and, on paper, makes rolling out, tweaking, and playing with Rails applications a snap. Rather than blather on about how this could become a game-changer in the Web applications industry, instead I'll point you to Heroku's own excellent set of screencasts and feature tours.
Adam Wiggins, one of the three partners behind Heroku, has some more "from the trenches" detail in this post on his personal blog.
Update: I probably should have mentioned that this is still a week away from public beta.
November 9, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Looks great, just too bad the wait time for the beta is about a week.
November 10, 2007 at 12:13 am
What ... the... hell? I'm completely dumbfounded by this. Wow, I want to try this out!
November 10, 2007 at 10:00 am
But is open source or will be open???
November 10, 2007 at 8:03 pm
the rails take to many online DIY databases like dabbledb, coghead etc...
RAD environment with the power of RoR
great job, cant wait to see how this matures...
November 11, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Am I the only one reminded of LPC, MOO, and other old-school "online mutable object environments" (aka MUDs), where you'd interact with the environment and develop it in an integrated fashion?
The more things change...
November 15, 2007 at 7:42 am
This looks awesome, I'm in line for the beta. If this is as good as they say, it could change the way we all make websites.
November 21, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Neat idea, but to me it seems like more of a proof-of-concept more than anything else. Not many people will be leaving the comfort of their desktop editors for a while :)
November 21, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Unless they really end up with an ultra slick interface or perhaps a "wizard" to generate certain sorts of apps (almost like Zing) I'd probably agree with you, Gary, although it's a bit like Yahoo Pipes I guess.. you gotta get the tech out there to get people talking before they realize what they can do with it.
November 21, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Peter, I completely agree. That's why I labeled is as a proof-of-concept - because I think it should be analyzed to decipher the best parts of the application that can be applied to other things, as opposed to a product that is trying to get customers. I think it's doing both, which works for me, too, since it would need people to use it before people realize other things that this can be applied to...