anyone have experience with node on heroku, with all the jazz (mongo, redis, socket.io)?
The best part about using Heroku for NodeJS apps is that I can focus more on writing my app code and less on sysadmin-related tasks. I don't have to worry very much about provisioning or scaling ("heroku scale web=2" tadaaa).
The downsides include cost (this depends on a variety of factors of course, e.g. what 3rd party plugins you're using) and lack of "control" (if you care about that sort of thing). Also, they don't support WebSockets (yet).
<self-promotion-warning> My Node Knockout app is running nodejs/mongo/redis/socket.io (resorting to long-polling since Heroku doesn't support Websockets, but it's quick enough): http://restalytics.com (sorry, the home page is kinda busted, but scroll down to the bottom and log in with nkodemo@restalytics.com/nkodemo if you'd like to see a working demo. Modern browsers only). </self-promotion-warning>
Edit: I'm linking to my app to show you an example of a working NodeJS app on Heroku, but I've wrapped it in a self-promotion-warning regardless to preemptively fend off any downvotes that I might get as a result of people misunderstanding my intentions.
Edit2: Full disclosure, I happen to work at Salesforce.com.
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/node-js
You have to use an add-on for Mongo, but it's easy to configure that from the Heroku app dashboard. Overall, I have been pleased thus far. The one gotcha I ran into was that you have to define the port the app will listen on as process.env.PORT as opposed to your own port. Thus, assuming you are using express, the line is:
app.listen(process.env.PORT || YOUR LOCAL DEV PORT);
"-----> Compiled slug size is 3.2MB"
It takes 3.2MB to say "Hello World!" on Heroku using Node.js?
that's basically Rails