Heroku: here come the light-weight apps

I had dismissed Heroku as a toy after getting my first invite, a glorified web-based Texmate to let you code rails applications.

After Ruby Inside mentioned their new API, I gave it another look and had to change my mind. It looks like they’re set to really nail the issue of rails deployment and scaling. A git mirror, with deployment and scaling - for free!

Should OpenId support in Rails ever get really worked out (see #10604), it will become trivially easy to code and deploy small applications. Ideally, a programmer’s time is spent on modeling the business domain and creating a simple UI - not on incidental complexity of project management overhead.

On a recent project to track my wine tastings, I have been using git along with a plain text file to keep track of bugs and to-dos. bugs.txt file got checked in to the git repo; it’s simple and It Just Works (TM).

If dealing with capistrano and server configuration was getting you down on your week-end projects, check out Heroku. For your next week-end app, it might just be the thing - and they promise to keep growing capacity so if your baby grows up you may be able to stay with them.

Aaah, never having to worry about deployment again.