[Rubyinstaller-devel] Heroku

[Charles Roper]

Hey guys,

In an attempt to try and do something constructive for the community I 
looked into installing Radiant on the free Heroku account ("Blossom" + 1 
dyno = $0 -- sweet).

The results and ease of deployment were surprising. For the test I used 
the "roasters" bootstrap site that comes with Radiant. Check it out:

http://young-fog-92.heroku.com/

Have a play with the admin interface:

http://young-fog-92.heroku.com/admin
user: oneclick
pass: oneclick

To me, seeing as it is running on a completely free account, that site 
is working pretty nicely.

I followed these instructions to get it up and running:

http://tr.im/mDSb

There were a few hiccups along the way which, thankfully, were fixable. 
The Heroku guys are putting some effort into Windows compatibility for 
their client gems, although there are a few glitches still. See here 
(and my comment on there):

http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/?p=92

Overall, the fact that you can get a Rack-based app up and running 
quickly, easily and for free on Heroku without all of the hassles of 
servers and suchlike is *huge*. Part of what made PHP so massive was 
that drag-and-drop ease of deployment.

Then there's the fact that you don't have to freeze gems into your app; 
you just supply a .gems manifest instead and the gems get installed for 
you natively. For my test push of Radiant, this worked flawlessly.

http://docs.heroku.com/gems

So all of this goodness combines to make an experience that would be 
really appealing to Windows-based Rubyists. Install Ruby with the OCI, 
then have an app deployed and running in the net in minutes. That's a 
pretty cool experience to be offering potential Ruby users.

So that's why I think some sort of sponsorship from Heroku would be a 
perfect match.

Should I ask them if they're interested?

Charles