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Congratulations, you have built an app with one user! Now, if you want more users, and your home machine has a static IP, and port 80 is open, no problem. Exce

Congratulations, you have built an app with one user! Now, if you want more users, and your home machine has a static IP, and port 80 is open, no problem. Except for the part where you will live in terror of any security holes. Oh, and the part where you've only got one server -- if this is your production server, where do you do your development? And then there's the part where you have to set up an init task to launch your server when the computer reboots. And the backups, of course. Now show me how to give three remote collaborators secure access to your app's source code, but no access to anything else. The default Rails install workflow is really nice, don't get me wrong. And Capistrano is great, and Slicehost is pretty easy to work with. But for a quick-and-dirty Rails demo, particularly in a teaching environment, Heroku appears to kick serious ass.

jey 19y ago
Yes, servers should be maintained by people who know what they're doing. This means you need to hire a third party (e.g. Engine Yard) or learn how to admin a server. I'm not knocking Heroku -- you're right, it definitely looks like it'd be great for people just getting into web development or programming in general. I bet that most people who get into programming these days start off thinking "I want to make a website", and tools like this cater to that crowd.
geebee 19y ago
You've given some good reasons for why it's complicated to install and configure a web framework. But the claim here is that ruby and rails are difficult relative to other programming languages. Having installed and configured other frameworks for dev work, I'd say that rails is exceptionally easy, but I can't really speak to the challenges at the production level. For that, I use Joyent, which has been fairly easy as well. None of this is meant to knock Heroku.

jey 19y ago

Yes, servers should be maintained by people who know what they're doing. This means you need to hire a third party (e.g. Engine Yard) or learn how to admin a server. I'm not knocking Heroku -- you're right, it definitely looks like it'd be great for people just getting into web development or programming in general. I bet that most people who get into programming these days start off thinking "I want to make a website", and tools like this cater to that crowd.

geebee 19y ago

You've given some good reasons for why it's complicated to install and configure a web framework. But the claim here is that ruby and rails are difficult relative to other programming languages. Having installed and configured other frameworks for dev work, I'd say that rails is exceptionally easy, but I can't really speak to the challenges at the production level. For that, I use Joyent, which has been fairly easy as well. None of this is meant to knock Heroku.