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It's worth pointing out that Google App Engine + JRuby & Rack Apps is considerably cheaper than Heroku. You can build a full Rack app w/ DataMapper, one that i

It's worth pointing out that Google App Engine + JRuby & Rack Apps is considerably cheaper than Heroku. You can build a full Rack app w/ DataMapper, one that is portable (i.e. no lock in) and scalable, w/o having to pay anything, prior to some serious traffic. (Caveat: Tool chain for Ruby on Google App Engine is a little raw at the moment, but it's coming along)

teej 17y ago
That's not the point. The point is to deploy in 15 minutes and then -never think about infrastructure again-. In the early days, anything that's keeping your product from customers is getting in your way.
- mrkurt 17y ago
  To be fair, Google AppEngine gives you that same ability. The difference is, you have to build your app for AppEngine rather than building a plane jane vanilla rack/rails/sinatra/whatever app with postgres. The app I have running on Heroku uses a number of prebuilt gems, including things like twitter-auth that sort of assume you're using migrations and ActiveRecord with it. I may move it over to AppEngine at some point, but the absolute fastest way for me to get an app up and running was with Heroku.
  - knowtheory 17y ago
    You're not entirely correct on that point either. The goal that i have as someone who's building tools for GAE, is to sufficiently abstract the GAE tools so that you aren't building specifically to AppEngine's infrastructure. DataMapper is a great example of an abstraction layer that allows you to build application code that is portable across infrastructure. The goal is to be able to build an application on GAE, and if your requirements change at some point and GAE doesn't fit, you can migrate off of it without substantial pain.
  - knowtheory 17y ago
    Additionally, it's pretty quick to get an application up and running on GAE as well. Not entirely trivial at the moment, but it's getting close (still waiting on the release of a couple gems before i can say that's the case). If you want to see one way to get an application up and running here's one: http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/wiki/GettingStarted http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/wiki/GettingStarted
- knowtheory 17y ago
  Yeah, and with AppEngine, you can build an app, deploy it, and continue to hack on it, and improve it without having to pay any money, Heroku gives you 5 megs of space free, yeah? AppEngine's currently limit is a gig of storage space, 46.3 CPU hrs, 10gigabytes of incoming, and 10gigabytes of outgoing traffic PER DAY. Both EC2 and Heroku cost you money as soon as you start to use them. So, sure i will agree, it's easier to get up and running on Heroku if you're a vanilla Ruby dev. AppEngine's scaling is a lot more sensible economically imo. And this absolutely not to knock Heroku, they are doing some really cool stuff. But for speculative projects, AppEngine is nice, and free for a lot of uses.

teej 17y ago

That's not the point. The point is to deploy in 15 minutes and then -never think about infrastructure again-. In the early days, anything that's keeping your product from customers is getting in your way.

mrkurt 17y ago
To be fair, Google AppEngine gives you that same ability. The difference is, you have to build your app for AppEngine rather than building a plane jane vanilla rack/rails/sinatra/whatever app with postgres. The app I have running on Heroku uses a number of prebuilt gems, including things like twitter-auth that sort of assume you're using migrations and ActiveRecord with it. I may move it over to AppEngine at some point, but the absolute fastest way for me to get an app up and running was with Heroku.
- knowtheory 17y ago
  You're not entirely correct on that point either. The goal that i have as someone who's building tools for GAE, is to sufficiently abstract the GAE tools so that you aren't building specifically to AppEngine's infrastructure. DataMapper is a great example of an abstraction layer that allows you to build application code that is portable across infrastructure. The goal is to be able to build an application on GAE, and if your requirements change at some point and GAE doesn't fit, you can migrate off of it without substantial pain.
- knowtheory 17y ago
  Additionally, it's pretty quick to get an application up and running on GAE as well. Not entirely trivial at the moment, but it's getting close (still waiting on the release of a couple gems before i can say that's the case). If you want to see one way to get an application up and running here's one: http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/wiki/GettingStarted http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/wiki/GettingStarted
knowtheory 17y ago
Yeah, and with AppEngine, you can build an app, deploy it, and continue to hack on it, and improve it without having to pay any money, Heroku gives you 5 megs of space free, yeah? AppEngine's currently limit is a gig of storage space, 46.3 CPU hrs, 10gigabytes of incoming, and 10gigabytes of outgoing traffic PER DAY. Both EC2 and Heroku cost you money as soon as you start to use them. So, sure i will agree, it's easier to get up and running on Heroku if you're a vanilla Ruby dev. AppEngine's scaling is a lot more sensible economically imo. And this absolutely not to knock Heroku, they are doing some really cool stuff. But for speculative projects, AppEngine is nice, and free for a lot of uses.