8 ms·

Facebook and Heroku

265 points by briandoll 15y ago

briandoll 15y ago
This is pure win. The screencast on this post shows that with one click you get a deployed app (in the language you choose) that ships with an app template that uses the Facebook APIs to get you started. We're witnessing a Facebook app that creates real living Facebook apps. Heroku continues to impress with insanely easy onboarding of folks new to deploying web apps, and building features the way things should work. It must be amazing to start programming in the age of Heroku.
- mistermustard 15y ago
  Agreed. The barriers to start developing a web app now are incredibly low. You've got a server backend in Heroku, wand Facebook's gazillions of users right out of the gate.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  It's certainly a win for both companies involved. I've thought about using Heroku, and making a Facebook app, and the 2 of them together now makes it a lot more likely that both will happen.
- mwsherman 15y ago
  Actually, that’s the thing – if you are starting now it’s not amazing, it’s normal. :) It’s amazing to us fogies.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jerememonteau 15y ago
    Exactly. Having started building webapps (when there just called CGI) in 1996 and seen all of the app servers and platforms come and go, there has never been a better time than now to be a web developer, thanks to products like Heroku, New Relic, SauceLabs, CloudBees, etc.. I'm constantly blown away by the improvements in developer efficiently being made seemingly every day right now. This is why you are seeing a ton of startups (even the well funded ones) only hiring a small focused technical team. What is rather funny is watching how fragmented the mobile development space has become, with some exceptions (PhoneGap, SpacePort, Mobify, etc.), especially considering that is where people are moving so rapidly to do their computing. But I'm no mobile expert so my perception is probably skewed.
- stevenbedrick 15y ago
  The fact that the boilerplate app includes working examples of using the various Facebook APIs is the icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a couple of apps back in the relatively early days of the API, and I remember being very frustrated by the state of the documentation and the lack of useful examples[1], and something like this would have saved me an absurd amount of time. 1: It's been a few years since I last had to do this, so the situation might have improved since then.
  - brlewis 15y ago
    The graph API did improve the situation a lot, but when I worked with it last December (creating albums, posting photos) I did encounter a gap or two in the documentation. OAuth2 is definitely simpler than the old home-grown authentication system, which I never used because it looks insecure: They sign a string formed by concatenating name/value pairs without a delimiter between pairs.
  - devillej 15y ago
    It hasn't. You have to have a lot of knowhow to get these things working reliably. I'm extremely impressed with this effort.
2arrs2ells 15y ago
Remind anyone of the Facebook/Joyent partnership 3-4 years ago?
- chaz 15y ago
  That was just a marketing offer, where FB app developers got a month of Joyent for free. This is an integration that's much more impressive for getting developers past hosting, permissions, security, etc. to their first line of code much, much faster. It took me 10 minutes to get to "Hello, World."
dave_sullivan 15y ago
At Dreamforce a couple weeks ago I was wondering how sfdc was going to position Heroku since sfdc has already put a lot of time/effort into selling force.com. Seemed like they were trying to make the argument: "You use heroku for facebook apps and force.com for everything else!" This makes even more sense in that context.
- bgentry 15y ago
  Actually, it's more like this: Use Force.com for rapidly developing an app that integrates with Salesforce or fits within the limited scope of what that platform offers. For everything else, use Heroku.
  - dave_sullivan 15y ago
    I agree in practice, although I don't think that's the way sfdc's marketing team has presented it at all. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard anyone connected w/ sfdc ever use the phrase "limited scope of what our platform offers" for force.com's offerings, but I'm glad not everyone over there is drinking the kool-aid :-)
jorde 15y ago
As a Python developer I was delighted to see Python in the list of supported languages. After cloning the repo you can notice it's just a standard Flask site with Jijna2 templates and helpers for accessing Facebook's API. I can see this as a really easy way to start developing for Facebook and also Python.
- jorde 15y ago
  And here's their template: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python
- tomkr 15y ago
  I've been expecting Heroku to add Python for a while now. There's a few Python-specific "cloud" providers popping up, but Heroku has a lot of stuff going for it, like the add-ons. I'll be really excited when they add full support for Python.
davcro 15y ago
Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologizing and putting the apps back online. After a couple weeks I realized that I had a scaling problem and began learning how to setup a dedicated server. Over the next two years I spent about 80% of my time wrestling with hardware, setting up load balancers, configuring cache and db servers, and other operational nightmares. I had little time or energy to work on improving my apps or building new products. Then I discovered Heroku. I would have done anything to have this when I started out. The platform teaches (forces) you how to build a scalable architecture. You can try out new ideas for apps for essentially nothing (1 dyno is zero dollars). Since moving to Heroku I spend about 5% of my time working ops. The craziest thing is I've actually saved money since switching from dedicated hardware to Heroku. I was really bad at configuring servers and the stuff I built was inefficient and expensive. Heroku's cloud stacks are optimized better than my old hardware environment. Heroku's architecture is great for wild traffic swings common with Facebook apps. Well except for their database services. They don't seem reliable or scalable. I prefer RDS. In sum, Facebook and Heroku is a great starting place for learning to build web apps. I would have done anything to have this tech four yeas ago.
- bgentry 15y ago
  Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?
  - malyk 15y ago
    Probably that the cheap plans are on shared DBs and it's very expensive to use dedicated DBs and the dedicated boxes appear to be single instances of Postgres. I'm not complaining, but what is the official Heroku approach to things like DB sharding, etc.
    - 15y ago
nomatteus 15y ago
Anyone see a list of what framework is being used for each language? I created a Ruby app, and it's using Sinatra. Edit: here's links to all the app templates, for anyone interested: Python: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python Ruby: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-ruby https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-ruby Node.js: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-nodejs https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-nodejs PHP: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-php https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-php
- LeafStorm 15y ago
  Python: Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/ http://flask.pocoo.org/) Ruby: Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com/ http://www.sinatrarb.com/) Node: Express (http://expressjs.com/ http://expressjs.com/) PHP: No framework
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
A-K 15y ago
Heroku is killing it. It's great to see them adding features and functionality at such a brisk pace.
alexandros 15y ago
Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed that scene, not lack of hosting support.
- tlack 15y ago
  Totally agree. I don't think too many Facebook app vendors are worrying about scaling. If Facebook wants to get more developers to embrace their dying platform (when was the last time you heard about an exciting new FB app?), they'll need to silence the voices screaming from every corner of the Internet about their lame documentation and support. Buy as usual, instead they do a song and dance announcing a new initiative and then completely forget about it, like their Stack Overflow support system which does not seem to have nearly enough participation from actual Facebook employees who can answer questions.
  - sondh 15y ago
    I don't really get the idea of the app but anyway, TechCrunch Disrupt winner is Shaker.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- div 15y ago
  One of the major pains when writing facebook apps is that their documentation is either incorrect, out of date or non-existant. If you create a facebook app using heroku, it looks like you get something akin to a facebook-boilerplate app that is already deployed. I would imagine the people at Heroku / Facebook spending some effort in keeping their boilerplate app / demo up to date with any api changes that may occur.
- blored 15y ago
silverlight 15y ago
Am I the only one who wasn't aware that Heroku announced support for PHP?
- larrys 15y ago
  I can't find it on the site right and was surprised also.
- malyk 15y ago
  They are only allowing Python and PHP for facebook apps right now. So no, you didn't miss it as it didn't happen. Today's announcement probably means it will happen in the near future though.
pstinnett 15y ago
This seems great. I know Facebook is switching (or has switched) to requiring 3rd party apps to use an SSL certificate. Since many of the Facebook apps I've been developing don't really require much (many times they're just informational pages, no user input) it seems like a waste to buy a full domain and SSL cert. Being able to just use Heroku's domain and piggyback SSL could be a big win there.
choffstein 15y ago
I am constantly impressed with Heroku's ability to identify market needs, create partnerships, and deliver product. I would love to see an article or book about their company and its evolution.
sbauch 15y ago
Why sinatra and not rails? I've been trying to teach myself ruby (on rails) for an app idea that I have, and this was great news as I'd been having trouble getting off the ground with rails and the koala gem. But for someone new to programming like myself, it seems like there is a ton more learning materials out there for the rails framework than sinatra. So in a way this seems to me like a very easy way to get a simple app up and running, but I lose all the help that's out there that's specific to the rails framework. Am I being naive in thinking that the little that I've learned about the rails framework won't apply to sinatra?
- dasil003 15y ago
  Because Rails is overkill and tuned for large websites. Most Facebook apps are pretty tiny, so it makes sense to start with a lighter-weight framework.
- compay 15y ago
  There are probably lots of reasons, but I'd imagine one of them is that a simple Sinatra app consumes less resources than a simple Rails 3.1 app, and if Heroku is going to be adding tens of thousands of them, the savings probably adds up.
  - bgentry 15y ago
    Each dyno (isolated running process) is given the same type of container to run in and the difference in data storage is trivial (a couple megs of gems). In this case it's more about making it simple to get started. Rails has a fairly large learning curve, and the asset pipeline in 3.1 has only made it worse.
    - compay 15y ago
      Cool, thanks for the inside scoop!
    - nevinera 15y ago
      The asset pipeline is completely optional. If you just put css and javascript files in the public directory, you can use them just like before.
flexterra 15y ago
Awesome integration and I also noticed Python support. Win!
padobson 15y ago
This seems like a last ditch effort to appease social app developers before they all jump ship to Google+. 4 years too late for me.
flexterra 15y ago
I noticed that they offer python hosting now. So I did a little tutorial on how to set up a Django app on Heroku. http://elweb.co/programacion/how-to-host-django-apps-on-heroku/ http://elweb.co/programacion/how-to-host-django-apps-on-hero...
wiradikusuma 15y ago
"Apps are created from one of four templates, based on the language choice you make at app creation time: Ruby, Node.js, Python, or PHP." Why no Java?

265 points by briandoll 15y ago

This is pure win. The screencast on this post shows that with one click you get a deployed app (in the language you choose) that ships with an app template that uses the Facebook APIs to get you started. We're witnessing a Facebook app that creates real living Facebook apps. Heroku continues to impress with insanely easy onboarding of folks new to deploying web apps, and building features the way things should work. It must be amazing to start programming in the age of Heroku.

mistermustard 15y ago
Agreed. The barriers to start developing a web app now are incredibly low. You've got a server backend in Heroku, wand Facebook's gazillions of users right out of the gate.
wccrawford 15y ago
It's certainly a win for both companies involved. I've thought about using Heroku, and making a Facebook app, and the 2 of them together now makes it a lot more likely that both will happen.
mwsherman 15y ago
Actually, that’s the thing – if you are starting now it’s not amazing, it’s normal. :) It’s amazing to us fogies.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jerememonteau 15y ago
  Exactly. Having started building webapps (when there just called CGI) in 1996 and seen all of the app servers and platforms come and go, there has never been a better time than now to be a web developer, thanks to products like Heroku, New Relic, SauceLabs, CloudBees, etc.. I'm constantly blown away by the improvements in developer efficiently being made seemingly every day right now. This is why you are seeing a ton of startups (even the well funded ones) only hiring a small focused technical team. What is rather funny is watching how fragmented the mobile development space has become, with some exceptions (PhoneGap, SpacePort, Mobify, etc.), especially considering that is where people are moving so rapidly to do their computing. But I'm no mobile expert so my perception is probably skewed.
stevenbedrick 15y ago
The fact that the boilerplate app includes working examples of using the various Facebook APIs is the icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a couple of apps back in the relatively early days of the API, and I remember being very frustrated by the state of the documentation and the lack of useful examples[1], and something like this would have saved me an absurd amount of time. 1: It's been a few years since I last had to do this, so the situation might have improved since then.
- brlewis 15y ago
  The graph API did improve the situation a lot, but when I worked with it last December (creating albums, posting photos) I did encounter a gap or two in the documentation. OAuth2 is definitely simpler than the old home-grown authentication system, which I never used because it looks insecure: They sign a string formed by concatenating name/value pairs without a delimiter between pairs.
- devillej 15y ago
  It hasn't. You have to have a lot of knowhow to get these things working reliably. I'm extremely impressed with this effort.

2arrs2ells 15y ago

Remind anyone of the Facebook/Joyent partnership 3-4 years ago?

chaz 15y ago
That was just a marketing offer, where FB app developers got a month of Joyent for free. This is an integration that's much more impressive for getting developers past hosting, permissions, security, etc. to their first line of code much, much faster. It took me 10 minutes to get to "Hello, World."

dave_sullivan 15y ago

At Dreamforce a couple weeks ago I was wondering how sfdc was going to position Heroku since sfdc has already put a lot of time/effort into selling force.com. Seemed like they were trying to make the argument: "You use heroku for facebook apps and force.com for everything else!" This makes even more sense in that context.

bgentry 15y ago
Actually, it's more like this: Use Force.com for rapidly developing an app that integrates with Salesforce or fits within the limited scope of what that platform offers. For everything else, use Heroku.
- dave_sullivan 15y ago
  I agree in practice, although I don't think that's the way sfdc's marketing team has presented it at all. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard anyone connected w/ sfdc ever use the phrase "limited scope of what our platform offers" for force.com's offerings, but I'm glad not everyone over there is drinking the kool-aid :-)

jorde 15y ago

As a Python developer I was delighted to see Python in the list of supported languages. After cloning the repo you can notice it's just a standard Flask site with Jijna2 templates and helpers for accessing Facebook's API. I can see this as a really easy way to start developing for Facebook and also Python.

jorde 15y ago
And here's their template: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python
tomkr 15y ago
I've been expecting Heroku to add Python for a while now. There's a few Python-specific "cloud" providers popping up, but Heroku has a lot of stuff going for it, like the add-ons. I'll be really excited when they add full support for Python.

davcro 15y ago

Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologizing and putting the apps back online. After a couple weeks I realized that I had a scaling problem and began learning how to setup a dedicated server. Over the next two years I spent about 80% of my time wrestling with hardware, setting up load balancers, configuring cache and db servers, and other operational nightmares. I had little time or energy to work on improving my apps or building new products. Then I discovered Heroku. I would have done anything to have this when I started out. The platform teaches (forces) you how to build a scalable architecture. You can try out new ideas for apps for essentially nothing (1 dyno is zero dollars). Since moving to Heroku I spend about 5% of my time working ops. The craziest thing is I've actually saved money since switching from dedicated hardware to Heroku. I was really bad at configuring servers and the stuff I built was inefficient and expensive. Heroku's cloud stacks are optimized better than my old hardware environment. Heroku's architecture is great for wild traffic swings common with Facebook apps. Well except for their database services. They don't seem reliable or scalable. I prefer RDS. In sum, Facebook and Heroku is a great starting place for learning to build web apps. I would have done anything to have this tech four yeas ago.

bgentry 15y ago
Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?
- malyk 15y ago
  Probably that the cheap plans are on shared DBs and it's very expensive to use dedicated DBs and the dedicated boxes appear to be single instances of Postgres. I'm not complaining, but what is the official Heroku approach to things like DB sharding, etc.
  - 15y ago

nomatteus 15y ago

Anyone see a list of what framework is being used for each language? I created a Ruby app, and it's using Sinatra. Edit: here's links to all the app templates, for anyone interested: Python: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-python Ruby: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-ruby https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-ruby Node.js: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-nodejs https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-nodejs PHP: https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-php https://github.com/heroku/facebook-template-php

LeafStorm 15y ago
Python: Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/ http://flask.pocoo.org/) Ruby: Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com/ http://www.sinatrarb.com/) Node: Express (http://expressjs.com/ http://expressjs.com/) PHP: No framework

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

A-K 15y ago

Heroku is killing it. It's great to see them adding features and functionality at such a brisk pace.

alexandros 15y ago

Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed that scene, not lack of hosting support.

tlack 15y ago
Totally agree. I don't think too many Facebook app vendors are worrying about scaling. If Facebook wants to get more developers to embrace their dying platform (when was the last time you heard about an exciting new FB app?), they'll need to silence the voices screaming from every corner of the Internet about their lame documentation and support. Buy as usual, instead they do a song and dance announcing a new initiative and then completely forget about it, like their Stack Overflow support system which does not seem to have nearly enough participation from actual Facebook employees who can answer questions.
- sondh 15y ago
  I don't really get the idea of the app but anyway, TechCrunch Disrupt winner is Shaker.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
div 15y ago
One of the major pains when writing facebook apps is that their documentation is either incorrect, out of date or non-existant. If you create a facebook app using heroku, it looks like you get something akin to a facebook-boilerplate app that is already deployed. I would imagine the people at Heroku / Facebook spending some effort in keeping their boilerplate app / demo up to date with any api changes that may occur.
blored 15y ago

silverlight 15y ago

Am I the only one who wasn't aware that Heroku announced support for PHP?

larrys 15y ago
I can't find it on the site right and was surprised also.
malyk 15y ago
They are only allowing Python and PHP for facebook apps right now. So no, you didn't miss it as it didn't happen. Today's announcement probably means it will happen in the near future though.

pstinnett 15y ago

This seems great. I know Facebook is switching (or has switched) to requiring 3rd party apps to use an SSL certificate. Since many of the Facebook apps I've been developing don't really require much (many times they're just informational pages, no user input) it seems like a waste to buy a full domain and SSL cert. Being able to just use Heroku's domain and piggyback SSL could be a big win there.

choffstein 15y ago

I am constantly impressed with Heroku's ability to identify market needs, create partnerships, and deliver product. I would love to see an article or book about their company and its evolution.

sbauch 15y ago

Why sinatra and not rails? I've been trying to teach myself ruby (on rails) for an app idea that I have, and this was great news as I'd been having trouble getting off the ground with rails and the koala gem. But for someone new to programming like myself, it seems like there is a ton more learning materials out there for the rails framework than sinatra. So in a way this seems to me like a very easy way to get a simple app up and running, but I lose all the help that's out there that's specific to the rails framework. Am I being naive in thinking that the little that I've learned about the rails framework won't apply to sinatra?

dasil003 15y ago
Because Rails is overkill and tuned for large websites. Most Facebook apps are pretty tiny, so it makes sense to start with a lighter-weight framework.
compay 15y ago
There are probably lots of reasons, but I'd imagine one of them is that a simple Sinatra app consumes less resources than a simple Rails 3.1 app, and if Heroku is going to be adding tens of thousands of them, the savings probably adds up.
- bgentry 15y ago
  Each dyno (isolated running process) is given the same type of container to run in and the difference in data storage is trivial (a couple megs of gems). In this case it's more about making it simple to get started. Rails has a fairly large learning curve, and the asset pipeline in 3.1 has only made it worse.
  - compay 15y ago
    Cool, thanks for the inside scoop!
  - nevinera 15y ago
    The asset pipeline is completely optional. If you just put css and javascript files in the public directory, you can use them just like before.

flexterra 15y ago

Awesome integration and I also noticed Python support. Win!

padobson 15y ago

This seems like a last ditch effort to appease social app developers before they all jump ship to Google+. 4 years too late for me.

flexterra 15y ago

I noticed that they offer python hosting now. So I did a little tutorial on how to set up a Django app on Heroku. http://elweb.co/programacion/how-to-host-django-apps-on-heroku/ http://elweb.co/programacion/how-to-host-django-apps-on-hero...

wiradikusuma 15y ago

"Apps are created from one of four templates, based on the language choice you make at app creation time: Ruby, Node.js, Python, or PHP." Why no Java?