9 Jul
Heroku - Ruby in the Clouds
Heroku is a cloud application platform for Ruby in which deployment is simply a git push. I was curious to see just how straightforward it actually is to use and so decided to re-write salin.org so that I could deploy it on Heroku.
Although the focus seems to be Ruby on Rails applications, Heroku supports all Rack-based ruby web applications. Because of this I decided to re-write the site using Padrino, a ruby web framework based on Sinatra. The initial reason I went with Padrino was because I had a load of issues with Rails 3.0 beta but having now tried Padrino out I highly recommend it - development is straightforward with practically no learning curve if you already know Ruby.
To deploy the site once I had committed it to git: git push heroku master. Yes it really was that straightforward (obviously I had to install a heroku ruby gem, set the production config and do the database migration...but we're talking a few lines of code). It must be the most painless web deployment I've ever done, I really can't recommend Heroku enough.
What are you waiting for?..go and try it out yourself.
