Shanti’s Dispatches

It may not be much, but I whipped up this battles app in an hour using Heroku.

Heroku is pretty much the exact idea that I blogged about in February.

Now… is this the Visual Basic for the web? No, certainly not yet.

Heroku definitely still has some maturing to do before it will appeal to non-developers who want to whip up simple web applications.

Questions, and Where Heroku Could Go from Here

So… one possible use for Heroku is by actual developers, who simply want to quickly pop into their application’s code and change a few things, all via the web. I’ve wanted to do this on plenty of occasions. Under this use scenario, Heroku is simply a glorfied (though very slick) web-based IDE. Still cool though, but you’re not nearly leveraging all of the interesting thing’s they’ve hooked into re: deployment, migrations and database management.

Actually using Heroku for deployment is tricky. Are you expecting your app to never get more then 10,000 - 50,000 visitors a day? Can Heroku reasonably scale beyond that? What will they charge, if so?

For the use-case scenario of non-developers using Heroku as sort of a Visual Basic for webapps, tons and tons of video tutorials would be necessary to get these people up to speed.

Most free tech video tutorials you see are by developers for developers; the presenter speaks the same language and uses verbiage that would be foreign to the average laymen (who isn’t programming savvy).

To speak to would-be developers “like they’re two year olds” would take a professional team, or at least some painful recording sessions by Heroku team members. (not sure if that is what they had in mind when starting the idea)

So… who knows if Sandy the Office Manager would ever be able to buy “Heroku for Dummies” and build some basic CRUD webapps to manage her office inventory list. It’d be cool though… =)

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos