Geeking Out on Ruby On Rails and Heroku

Lately I’ve gotten re-interested in the Ruby On Rails framework. It’s not only because of it’s sort of… “new hotness” that’s out there on the net, but it’s got a lot of neat technologies that are being used. Also this is all close enough to the work on webapps that I’m used to doing, but also different enough from old and boring Perl and HTML::Mason to make it interesting and not (completely) frustrating. Also I want to annoy the (PHP|Java|Scala|C#) lovers who may or may not be reading this 🙂

I started going to the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade meetups, and it was very cool to find other like minded folks in the area (the other big group around is in Vancouver, and when you’re out in the boonies, that’s a long way away!). Lots of newbies and not enough people to answer questions, but it’s a growing group that’s just starting out. The main dude, Miles is really enthusiastic about this stuff too, which is awesome. Oh, and I’m also insanely jelous of his brand new (used) 30″ Apple cinema display. Yowza that’s a big screen!

I also found out about a (currently) free Ruby on Rails hosting system called Heroku, and with a bit of help from the quickstart guide and the workflow guide (note, you have to run the “git remote add…” command before you can run the “git push…” command).

It’s a very cool system that gives you a subdomain, hosting, and a fairly sexy system to allow you to do local development and then push changes up to the “production” server. All for free. Course, if you’re not familiar with git at all then you get to learn that, which has been… “interesting” so far for someone like myself who only is really familiar with the basics of subversion.

Along with Heroku is something called Heroku Garden, which I’m not sure exactly how it factors into things. Looks like an online editor though, which is cool if you don’t have local development tools.

Currently it’s all free, with future pricing/packages to be determined. I’m sure that it’s just a clever ploy to get people hooked and then suck them to stay with a monthly fee 🙂 Course, for now it’s about as cheap as you can get, and it’s a fun setup to play with!

So for now I have a site setup with absolutely nothing going on. Hopefully I’ll have some stuff up there as I get more into things.