Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live | Hacker News Reader

Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live

heroku.com

33 pointschaostheory15 comments

I think this is a neat idea to capture all those PHP refugees who saw the outdated "Make a Rails Blog in 15 minutes". This may well be the start a whole bunch of Rails applets.

... it's just that I hate writing code in the browser. No vi shortcut keys. Plus all those other little tools I've accumulated in the past couple years.

You don't have to use a browser to write the code.

If I don't use the browser, I might as well use the rest of the development suite on the laptop. If I don't use their editor, I assume I'd have to upload the files somehow. The whole reason I'm using git now intsead of Subversion is because I cannot guarantee my internet connectivity. And I hate to admit it, any little interruption like that often serves as an excuse to not work on code.

If I use their import functionality to update the app, I can do it quicker by typing 'cap deploy' on the command line.

Don't get me wrong -- I think this is a pretty neat idea, particularly for folks who don't have much time or money invested in their own equipment. With the Facebook and Google social APIs out, I can see this as the preferred tool for sketching out an idea, and getting some users.

But for someone like me who has the infrastructure setup already, it would have to be insanely better than pounding away at my laptop, using my own version control system, the various versions of Rails I can use it with, running tests, the occasional need for BackgroundRB apps. Yeah, it does make me feel as if I weren't keeping up with the times, but then again, I have a hobby of finding gems in obscure ruins of antiquity.

There is a way to use your favorite editor through the browser:

ajaxterm + emacs

I guess that would be ajaxterm + vi for me. Cool.

If it is anything like the Slicehost console though, the latency on it drives me nuts.

Cool idea - I am sure everyone has thought of this a few times. Cool that someone actually did it.

I could see something like this working even better with pure javascript web frameworks (what with there being javascript in the browser). But they aren't as popular as rails (yet).

If it works smoothly, this will be awesome. I can literally travel the globe and work from any internet cafe.

However, I suspect there will be a lot of growing pains and bugs along the way. But it's a great idea and I'm looking forward to their release.

> I can literally travel the globe and work from any internet cafe.

I can do that now. My laptop has my development environment. No latency, no fears of dropped connections while editing. Local commits using mercurial, and my customized gvim rig.

And running "cap deploy" is pretty easy.

This seems aimed at people are are not quite ready to call themselves developers. But at some point, if you want to build Web apps, you are going to have to learn to install software and set up a database and really learn to use a code editor.

"But at some point, if you want to build Web apps, you are going to have to learn to install software and set up a database and really learn to use a code editor."

Why? I mean, yes, you absolutely have to have those skills today.

But for a lot of uses, this service, if it actually works would be more than adequate. And there is a "code editor" in the demos. Probably not a very good one, yet, but I bet it gets a lot better quickly.

Saying "you can't do web development in a web browser" is like saying "you can't run office applications in a web browser" or "you can't edit photos in a web browser". Every day those "can't do in a web browser" items get whittled away a little more.

Having said that, perhaps you're getting at "leaky abstractions"? There will always be something that you need to tweak, as a developer, that the development environment hasn't made accessible to you. That is certainly true, but I think that could become the exception more and more, and day to day development could happen in a web development environment. Developing in the exact same environment in which your app is running certainly raises interesting possibilities.

Well, what I meant was I could be wandering the streets of Beijing and going to work would be as easy as hitting up the nearest web-bar/internet cafe. As far as I know, they don't have them nifty EVDO cards in Beijing...

Based on the fact that they were testing them in 2004[0], I suspect they do.

[0]http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_1600...

I couldn't get one when I was there in Jan...anyone else in Beijing know for sure?

This will make little apps -- restaurants, dance studios, newsletters -- insanely easy to build and deploy.

I doubt it will do much for bigger ones, though. Scalability, performance and QOS are matters of system administration -- precisely the matters that Heroku takes out of your hands.

"Scalability, performance and QOS are matters of system administration"

I think Heroku would say that that's exactly the point.

My understanding is Heroku is primarily a development environment. If you want to make a full-blown gajillion-user app, you'll probably have to move it off Heroku's servers -- i.e. I don't see any way to edit DNS entries / use your own URL.

Maybe they'll allow you to update your account if you want to use them for hosting.

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