VentureBeat has a post on Heroku, which makes deployment of Ruby on Rails (RoR) apps easier:

San Francisco startup Heroku has found a fresh approach to helping developers build and deploy applications from the popular Ruby on Rails programming framework. It’s the only company to combine automated deployment — in other words, you just upload the code onto your browser and it will go live on the web — with an exclusive focus on Rails, says co-founder James Lindenbaum. Even more exciting is a recently released feature that moves Rails development into the Internet cloud.

At one point I had chatted with Graeme Rocher, CTO of G2One, the company created to shepherd Groovy and Grails technologies, and a portfolio company of ours, about why there isn’t an equivalent in the Java/Grails world, and whether it makes sense to create one.

He reminded me that Heroku is very useful in the Rails world because deployment is very painful in Rails. Many articles, including this one by Matthew Porter, CEO Contegix [How Ruby on Rails Could be Much Better] speak of this pain.

Graeme believes that if Rails had a solid deployment model, then products such as Heroku would be unnecessary. For instance, in Java, a lot of containers allow you to upload a war file via web interface, which achieves essentially what this product does.

So apparently this is very good (and revolutionary) for the Rails crowd, but nothing new or special for the Java crowd since Grails’ deployment model is based on Java’s deployment model, neither of which have these issues.

– Salil Deshpande

Tags: Groovy Grails