Question

I’ve been experimenting with programming Facebook apps and Heroku. It’s still not clear to me what server-side capabilities Heroku provides that I can use in my app, other then a place to host my web page and respond to PHP and Ruby commands. I heard you can’t even store data dynamically on their server? So what can you do? What kind of web-services does it provide?

Are there any examples of real Facebook apps/games that run on Heroku?

Answer 1

thanks for asking! I work for Heroku (best job ever!).

For services running on heroku you can check out their success page and you can see that anyone watching The Dark Knight, or Harry Potter through Facebook is doing it through Milyoni which is running on Heroku. Heroku is a development platform that allows anyone to build any type of application accessed through the web (including Facebook).

What you do with Heroku depends on your abilities, and the application that you program. Once you’ve built a program locally, you push it to Heroku where we’ll run it, and if you’re wildly successful Heroku makes it super easy to scale with no code changes. If you’re looking for a quick start we have examples of Sinatra which runs on Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and Python.

As for data you can use postgres on Heroku’s servers. All Heroku instances come with a shared postgres instance and you can upgrade if you need more capacity. Depending on the values you’re trying to store you can also use third party stores such as memcache,you can also use client side cookies, and any other data store that allows remote connections (almost all of them).

Hope that helps.