Heroku is a new Y Combinator startup that joins the growing number of Ruby on Rails hosts, however this host adds a special step of using your browser to build your apps. You can now create Rails applications inside of your browser. Or if you prefer to use your development environment you can do that as well. Heroku is built using Amazon EC2 service. You have the option to upload your own apps via a tar file, or through their gem and git.
From their website they have an awesome list of features:
- Instant Deployment
- Create and Edit Online
- Integrated Stack
- Elastic Performance
- Share and Collaborate
- Import & Export
- Full Ruby Environment
- Gems & Plugins
- Rails Console
- Generate Code
- Painless Migrations
- Rake Console
But don’t take my word for it, check out their screencasts for more information on how to get things up and going.
Heroku, part of Y Combinator startups from this winter, has been in development since June 2006 and has attracted about 2500 users with around 2000 apps.
I do hope that we start to see some new features like support for subversion, mysql databases, and capistrano based deployment. I look forward to seeing what else comes from them. Please keep these guys in your rails radar.
I’ve got my account setup and played with it for a few hours today. If you would like to give it a try, they have a small waiting list, however if you send me an email I can work on sending you an invite faster. Feel free to send me an email at ajmorris2002[at]gmail.com for an invite.