Heroku: Up and Running

Preface

So, What Is Heroku?

If you’re old enough and lucky enough to have had access to a computer in the early 1990s, you may have experienced the joy and wonder that was an MS-DOS game. These games were marvels of their time, but a number of them required you to do something odd, which was reboot your computer and boot into the game itself, thus taking the operating system (OS) out of the equation while the game was running.

The reason was that the OS put constraints on the game program; it used up resources needed by the game and forced certain rules into place that weren’t necessarily helpful for the game to run efficiently.

As time moved on, this approach was no longer needed. Operating systems were becoming more advanced and games were able to run quite happily within their boundaries. The games were able to benefit from the additional help that the OS gave for interfacing with hardware and so on.

These days, we would never imagine running our games outside of the platform provided by the OS; it’s just too much work and involvement for the developer. Why would a developer rewrite a whole hardware interface or library of sound drivers when it can rely on those provided by the OS?

Now think about this in the context of the Web. In the early days of deployment, everything was very much a homegrown affair: developers and system administrators had to figure out a lot of how things bolted together themselves, and worry about the things they had missed. As time rolled on, more and more ...