Heroku is the weirdest company I've seen. Everything started rather typically for a YC-backed group: an announcement of beta on YC news, immediate if not mandatory post on techcrunch, hundreds of enthusiastic comments. Cool.
Except this time I feel like I am alone in my feeling that the service is completely useless. Tell me, how is this better than my regular "offline" dev tools? How can browser-based JS-IDE even approach a productivity of NetBeans or my beloved Vim? Who told you that having a Rails stack on your own machine is hard? Who told you that deploying your existing (already developed) Rails app is hard? Why would I want Heroku?
I do remember that question, on YC application very well: "What is the problem you are trying to solve? What are your users forced to do now?". I am a typical user of Heroku, and I don't have any problems that need solutions like this. I am not forced to do anyting unpleasant. My life is awesome without Heroku. But I feel soooo dumb because of "not getting it".
In terms of development, maybe it's not better than what you have on the desktop. If you're really productive in your environment (terminal + vim OR IDE), then it definitely doesn't make sense to develop on their JS editor.
But in terms of hosting, it's a lot cheaper to host your Rails app using Heroku than getting a VPS. Both money-wise and time-wise.
I only listened a few minutes into the podcast, but I think one of the founders mentioned that at its current state Heroku is great for people who want to make apps for their friends, like 1-20 people. But these developers don't want to buy a VPS plan and manage the application themselves.
Their future goal is probably to get hosting for apps with 1000+ users, so they can make some money.
But you're right, for developing an app, I'll probably stick to the desktop. Maybe one day Heroku will get so slick that we can do all development straight from the browser and hit "Publish", like Weebly.
I think the pain with Rails right now is hosting for hobbyists.
For businesses, there's hosting pain, too. Rails is certainly easy to set up on a server, but then you... have a server. Complete with the hardware, scaling and security pain that comes along with it.
I've read a lot about ruby but coding wise I'm a ruby newbie. I signed up for Heroku yesterday and haven't gotten to the link yet but I plan to tomarrow.
If it seems to work then I'm going to show it to my daughter, who has gotten more interested in programming ever since we solved her "$1 word" math homework a few days ago with about 7 lines of python. Her school doesn't allow her to take her laptop or things like usb drives to school, but I don't think showing off stuff she makes online will be a problem.
Except this time I feel like I am alone in my feeling that the service is completely useless. Tell me, how is this better than my regular "offline" dev tools? How can browser-based JS-IDE even approach a productivity of NetBeans or my beloved Vim? Who told you that having a Rails stack on your own machine is hard? Who told you that deploying your existing (already developed) Rails app is hard? Why would I want Heroku?
I do remember that question, on YC application very well: "What is the problem you are trying to solve? What are your users forced to do now?". I am a typical user of Heroku, and I don't have any problems that need solutions like this. I am not forced to do anyting unpleasant. My life is awesome without Heroku. But I feel soooo dumb because of "not getting it".
Damn...