Heroku, the online Ruby on Rails (RoR) development and hosting environment, has raised $3 million from Redpoint Ventures and other angel investors.
The Y Combinator startup aims to make software development more accessible for a wider range of people. It does so by providing a browser-based programming environment that cuts out steps traditionally needed to produce RoR applications.
The founders picked RoR because it was designed for developers who want to actualize their ideas quickly. Heroku not only makes the development process easier, but it helps deploy and scale web applications, thereby making the maintenance of online software more feasible as well.
The service remains in private beta but we’re told the curtain should lift pretty soon. Meanwhile, developers interested in using Heroku can put their names down on a waitlist.
Co-founder James Lindenbaum says that the platform already supports over 10,000 developers and more than 12,000 applications. Almost all of them are non-critical sites, however, since the service is still working to maintain stability.
Also see Engine Yard, a company with a more hands-on approach to RoR hosting.
Congrats to them– they already have an outstanding offering!
Holy crap, I can’t wait to see what these guys do next…
YOU FOOLS RAILS CAN’T SCALE YOUR MONEY BURNS LIKE FIREFLIES IN THE EVENING!
Respectfully yours,
The Internet.
Somehow this made me laugh – I’ve heard so many sad RoR stories during the past few years …
Heroku looks really cool, I’ve got an account and I’m working on an app. The wait list only takes a day or two.
Problem is, its free for now, but how much is it going to cost? Am I going to get burned when I find out the app I just built on your platform now costs $100/month??
I used Heroku and I think it’s a clever hack.
What I did use it for?
to learn Rails! (and it’s a great environment for that).
What did I pay?
$0
Did I make any commercial apps that I would deploy with them?
Nope
If I did make the next big Rails app, would I deploy with them?
Nope, I’d go get a real rails hosting service.
Potential Revenue from me?
$0
Major congratulations to Adam, Orion and James…this measure of success was long overdue!
This service is for RoR “wanna be” developers.
True/Real developers not only know how to build RoR apps, but also know how to deploy and scale too.
Get real!
I interviewed Heroku for the Ruby on Rails Podcast in January:
http://podcast....episodes/heroku
I don’t get it.. they made like text mate in a web browser? I don’t like using google docs never mind an IDE.
These guys have a bright future. They’re doing something similar to what Bungee Connect is doing, except much better, in a great programming language, in a fraction of the time and cost as Bungee. Some of the open source code they’ve released (Rush) is really innovative, too.
i’ll stick to php lol
I’m as serious of a Rails developer as they get, and I love what Heroku is doing.
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Nice.
I might have to try out my developer account on there again.
“since the service is still working to maintain stability.”
You know, the more I read about RoR, the more I see comments like this.
It may be fun, it may be cool with the geeks, but when it comes to running a business where real money is on the line, I’ll stick with proven technologies rather than bleeding-edge new stuff.
And, personally, having used Rails to build an application, I don’t really see the gain in productivity that it claims. I’m sure that’s because the application I was building didn’t fit neatly into the Rails box, so it took a lot more work to get things working correctly. I guess if you want to stay in the box, you’re ok.
Oof, I don’t envy them trying to maintain stability with thousands of “apps” written by non-developers. They get mad props for being ambitious though.
@Chandrab: Heroku may be a editor and enviroment for Rails (although I like a local enviroment, but thats just preferance), but your apps are hosted on Amazon EC2, that is a nice place to host a small app!
(and it will scale)
Nice. If you don’t like it, don’t use it, but don’t claim there’s no value for it. Obviously people who view the market as a whole for a living see value in it. (duh?)
Good work guys – looking forward to what you do this year.
I used to work at an enterprise software company that build everything with J2EE technologies on top of Oracle.
Guess what, it did’nt scale! Does Java suck? no. Did the design of the app hurt the scaling? YEP
People point to twittr and say, “see, rails does not scale”. I bet (my opinion) if you rewrote twittr in java/.net/php/c or whatever, and used the same basic architecture, you would have the same basic problems.
I think this is a great idea. At my day job we are constantly running out of new environments to host projects as they move through our process. Being able to have a few accounts on Heroku for proof of concept apps would be a huge advantage.
As far as the argument that coding in a web browser sucks – I would say just wait. A blogger once pointed out that google is a simple ui but if you think about the server farms that are backing that up there is no way you would ever run that much on your desktop.
With ajax I can see a day soon when typing my code into a html textarea will be triggering off so much code on the server that it will swamp anything I could run on my desktop pc. Think about code completion, indexing, auto compile, auto deploy, full regression suite – all because I changed a variable name.
Actually, the goal of Heroku isn’t just a web version of textmate, that’s incidental. If you look at their homepage, the system is a complete application stack.
Imagine you’re trying to host a Rails app today, maybe a blog or maybe a simple application, a way for your after-work soccer league to track their schedules and scores. If you’re on PHP you have hundreds and hundreds of options. With Rails, you don’t.
The point of Heroku is to provide a dynamically scalable hosting platform that grows and shrinks the way your traffic does. That’s worth a hell of a lot to me as a developer. Plus I don’t develop apps in their online framework, I just upload my apps to them. Then I can tweak little things here and there if I need to.
Congrats to them as they have done a great job with the environment and product. They also have listened to user feedback, which is reflected in their product improvements. I have only built a few small prototypes apps and therefore have no idea how things will scale, etc.
Regardless of the programming language – the concept is great. They have made things simple and it allows people to focus on their creativity and skills.
Where this makes the most sense is I can hit the dev environment from any computer without needing to lug my laptop. I think they have just scratched the surface – but are certainly leading the way. I do hope when they start charging they have a reasonable tiered pricing and I also hope they add th capability to allow paired/collaborative programming within the environment.
http://s3.amazo...code_editor.mov
LOLZ!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why doesn’t somebody just create a web interface for Eclipse running on a server?
A text editor for code online just fenced 3M???
LOLZZZ
For one M I could have 4-5 people make an online version of Eclipse complete with 40 language plug in suite and SVN.
Retarded. I’m sorry. I think it’s retarded.
http://wiki.ecl...x.php/CVS_Howto
+
Web interface
=
You just destroyed a brand new 3 million dollar project in spades with a cherry on top.
wow, lets see them handle twitter
RoR is the biggest internet joke of all time
http://labs.ado...3:Release_Notes
“Adobe® Flex™ Builder™ 3 is Adobe’s professional Flex IDE built on Eclipse™.”
http://www.zend...roducts/studio/
“Proven Zend Studio technology powered by Eclipse”
You could just drop out the Java UI library and slide in a web/ajax class library to display the eclipse UI, or you could simply create a frontend in Flex that intefaces Eclipse directly with an API.
You can commercially reuse eclipse as seen by Zend and Adobe. I use Flex 3 studio with Eclipse everyday, and I had to pay $350 for it.
That would crush any web IDE period. If anybody develops this, let me work on it!!! I would almost drop what I’m doing to work on that.
Seems people are missing the point of Heroku. It is more than an online IDE… it is a cloud platform with a built in IDE.
Chris: you == the retarded one.
Heroku is much more than a text editor on the web, it allows one-click scalabed deployment. That means you write your app (using the online editor OR your own then upload via Git) then deploy the app to Heroku, which then handles all the deployment details, including scaling if needed.
@29 you mean like the build button in Eclipse?
You just mount the development/release drive on your server with NFS or Samba then work on the files directly in Eclipse then hit the build button.
That’s how everybody does it now.
Say your app is at
/var/www/myapp/
You mount that in windows as a shared drive then open the Eclipse project right in that folder. When you hit build it’s live. Or if you’re working on linux you just mount it as NFS with /etc/exports
Nobody FTPs files anymore.
If you swapped out the UI for Eclipse and made an online editor, you could simply have that deploy to /var/www/lastProject+1/ and it would be live too.
What you’re explaining is arcane and senseless as a feature.
“I believe you’re saying, our little editor uses a local server filesystem.”
An online version of Eclipse could do the same, but with NFS and samba you don’t even need that right now. For those who are lost, an Online Eclipse can do the exact same thing.
You are trying to confuse the issue for investors and executives. It’s NOT unique.
The deployment location of built files is irrelevant. That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying that’s not a substantial feature.
Chris just pwned Tom.
Ok Chris, so your NFS/samba solution is great. Now you got your files deployed to the server. Great. What about scaling? Provisioning elastic infrastructure? Dynamically horizontally expanding the app server layer? Dynamically vertically scaling the DB layer? Hello?
@33, or should I say Tom,
RoR is HORRIBLE at scaling. Just look at twitter.
So you created your app on the LAMP server where you mounted your Linux /var/www/myapp on your windows via samba, and you hit the build button on Eclipse. Your app is now freshly built and viewable on your remote LAMP server via the magic of cutting edge 1985 networked filesystem technology!
Now you want to scale!
su
enter p@ssword
[ $] yum install webmin
/sbin/service webmin start
https://myaweso...main.com:10000/
[ hits cluster tab ]
Uses webmin UI to configure large cluster.
LOLZ and goes back to sleep.
Again, you could pull the webmin clusting code right out of webmin and use it with a new Eclipse web IDE UI.
It wouldn’t even take 1 million dollars to complete. It would cost about 500k tops if there were no managers or execs to drive the BMW 745i’s of the world.
This is aimed at people who don’t know how to code or don’t visit digg. But those people are the least likely to use this. That’s the paradox. If there was a web UI for Eclipse they would never use this at all.
*sigh. chris, and tom – you love LAMP you love Rails blah blah blah. this is about something else and you’re all missing the point. people choose different platforms for different reasons, move on. i for one welcome more options, have tried Heroku, and love where they are headed. I wish them all the best!
I wonder what would happen if you built a Heroku inside a Heroku. Would it still scale?
I’d have to agree that serious RoR developers will probably want to DIY. If you’ve got the skills to build a serious web app, you won’t be seeking Heroku. This is more of a plug and play for non-serious web devs. But most non-serious web devs also don’t tend to use RoR. They use phps.
Now if someone creates something like this for PHP…
Heroku is like MorphExchange. Only the name is shorter ^_^
These things are really nice. I wonder if there are similar platforms for PHP. If there are, email me!
Congrats on the $$$. I am not a RoR fan, but … hey … it is not all about the technology.
“But most non-serious web devs also don’t tend to use RoR. They use phps.”
You’re full of crap. I’m calling you on it.
Chris.
Ha ha. A big blob on your web site says “Web 3.0 delivered”. That’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
Shame I’m not laughing with you.
Look likePHP developers may start using ROR since it is easier to shift from one open source to other.
This is a very good environment for non-critical apps, probably front ends to existing services. Lets face it, most apps are non-critical. And the more you know, the less time you want to waste on DIY.
It’s still a work in progress (i.e. don’t depend on it) , but its obvious they understand the future. Being able to work directly online, or use GIT covers the bases well. The limitations are pretty obvious immediately, so are unlikely to confuse.
@chris:
Rails CAN scale, maybe some developers can’t.
Example: http://www.shopify.com
And for me, Heroku is great!
It does not try to be an IDE! It only includes a leightweight editor, so you can directly apply changes to the running app. Of course there are lots ways to to manage your app on your server, and everyone has his own preference. But I worked with Heroku in the last months, and it certainly did it for me. (Note: these were just non-critical small apps).
You can host MULTIPLE projects there for FREE (at least for now), the UI is simple and intuitive, I was up and running in minutes, and the support is also very well, what more could I want? Yea, maybe the integrated cluster- and dependency-management is also worth noting…
It is good to see new SAAS providers getting the funding they need to give it a go.
Ross
http://www.hostdisciple.com
This is interesting stuff. RoR deployment has always been a bit of a headache and it looks like Heroku could be the ideal solution for many. That said, Rails deployment options are evolving and improving by the day and I generally prefer to deploy and setup my apps manually… for now, at least. Let’s see how Heroku are doing in a year’s time – best of luck to them!