

Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live - chaostheory
http://heroku.com/

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qaexl
I think this is a neat idea to capture all those PHP refugees who saw the
outdated "Make a Rails Blog in 15 minutes". This may well be the start a whole
bunch of Rails applets.

... it's just that I hate writing code in the browser. No vi shortcut keys.
Plus all those other little tools I've accumulated in the past couple years.

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pc
You don't have to use a browser to write the code.

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qaexl
If I don't use the browser, I might as well use the rest of the development
suite on the laptop. If I don't use their editor, I assume I'd have to upload
the files somehow. The whole reason I'm using git now intsead of Subversion is
because I cannot guarantee my internet connectivity. And I hate to admit it,
any little interruption like that often serves as an excuse to not work on
code.

If I use their import functionality to update the app, I can do it quicker by
typing 'cap deploy' on the command line.

Don't get me wrong -- I think this is a pretty neat idea, particularly for
folks who don't have much time or money invested in their own equipment. With
the Facebook and Google social APIs out, I can see this as the preferred tool
for sketching out an idea, and getting some users.

But for someone like me who has the infrastructure setup already, it would
have to be insanely better than pounding away at my laptop, using my own
version control system, the various versions of Rails I can use it with,
running tests, the occasional need for BackgroundRB apps. Yeah, it does make
me feel as if I weren't keeping up with the times, but then again, I have a
hobby of finding gems in obscure ruins of antiquity.

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michaelneale
Cool idea - I am sure everyone has thought of this a few times. Cool that
someone actually did it.

I could see something like this working even better with pure javascript web
frameworks (what with there being javascript in the browser). But they aren't
as popular as rails (yet).

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cglee
If it works smoothly, this will be awesome. I can literally travel the globe
and work from any internet cafe.

However, I suspect there will be a lot of growing pains and bugs along the
way. But it's a great idea and I'm looking forward to their release.

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jamesbritt
> I can literally travel the globe and work from any internet cafe.

I can do that now. My laptop has my development environment. No latency, no
fears of dropped connections while editing. Local commits using mercurial, and
my customized gvim rig.

And running "cap deploy" is pretty easy.

This seems aimed at people are are not quite ready to call themselves
developers. But at some point, if you want to build Web apps, you are going to
have to learn to install software and set up a database and really learn to
use a code editor.

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cglee
Well, what I meant was I could be wandering the streets of Beijing and going
to work would be as easy as hitting up the nearest web-bar/internet cafe. As
far as I know, they don't have them nifty EVDO cards in Beijing...

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Zak
Based on the fact that they were testing them in 2004[0], I suspect they do.

[0][http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_1600...](http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_160054.html)

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cglee
I couldn't get one when I was there in Jan...anyone else in Beijing know for
sure?

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jsnx
This will make little apps -- restaurants, dance studios, newsletters --
insanely easy to build and deploy.

I doubt it will do much for bigger ones, though. Scalability, performance and
QOS are matters of system administration -- precisely the matters that Heroku
takes out of your hands.

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pc
"Scalability, performance and QOS are matters of system administration"

I think Heroku would say that that's exactly the point.

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andrewfong
My understanding is Heroku is primarily a development environment. If you want
to make a full-blown gajillion-user app, you'll probably have to move it off
Heroku's servers -- i.e. I don't see any way to edit DNS entries / use your
own URL.

Maybe they'll allow you to update your account if you want to use them for
hosting.

