Oren Teich

Gem Bundler is rapidly on its way to becoming the new community standard for managing gem dependencies in Ruby apps. Bundler is the default gem manager for Rails 3, but it will also work seamlessly with any other web framework (or no framework) since it has no dependencies itself.

Using it is as simple as creating a Gemfile in the root of your app:

source :gemcutter
gem ‘sinatra’, ‘0.9.4’
gem ‘haml’, ‘2.2.17’

…and running “bundle install” at the command line, which sets up all of your gems.

Yehuda Katz has a writeup on using bundler that outlines…

You get a call from your partner that your app just hit the front page of Digg. You’re away from your computer, and need to scale your app up now! Fire up Nezumi and dial your dynos to 12 to handle the load no problem.

Nezumi is a 3rd party iPhone app that allows you to perform almost any of the functions that the CLI supports, from restarting your app, changing your dynos and workers, viewing logs, adding collaborators, and much more. It’s available now from the iTunes store.

Marshall, the developer of…

Modern web apps are increasingly making use of asynchronous, background workers for task processing needs. For many apps, workers are just as, if not even more important than the front end http stack. Ever since we launched DJ , we’ve been overwhelmed with requests from customers wanting access to several DJ workers per app. Based on the feedback, we have been coding away, making this happen, and today we’re proud to announce the release of Heroku Workers.

Workers as first-class citizens

The new Workers feature is based on Delayed Job, and will replace the current…

A couple of weeks ago we announced that New Relic RPM Bronze is available free of charge for all Heroku customers through the our add-on catalog New Relic RPM is a application performance management tool that allows you to monitor, troubleshoot, and tune the performance of your Heroku app. One-click integration with the Heroku platform means that you can activate an RPM account and start monitoring your application in just minutes.

Here’s more great news: now you can upgrade to RPM Silver or RPM Gold, through the same add-on catalog . RPM Silver and Gold…

These days, it seems like almost all apps need to send email. And everyone has a gmail account. So why not have your app send email through Gmail? It’s fairly easy with just a few steps.

Heroku currently runs Ruby 1.8.6. This means you need to provide your own SMTP TLS library. Luckily, Adam has made that super easy with a quick little Rails plugin . Simply install the library, set a few config variables , and you’re good to go. Best of all, this simple plugin will work on any…

Heroku has focused since day one on making the end-to-end application experience as easy as possible. From our git focused workflow to the automated management of deployed applications, we’ve worked hard to give developers the flexibility to build amazing apps. Today we’re excited to announce a major extension of this flexibility with Add-ons .

For those who just want to see it in action, here’s a 3 minute overview:

Add-ons

Add-ons are a way to extend your application. They can provide core functionality (like full-text search or cron ), add features…

Today we’re launching an exciting new feature – maintenance mode.

We strive to make your deployment and management experience as seamless as possible, for both the developers and the end users. Part of any management task is performing routine maintenance tasks, from database migrations to more complex site upgrades. When you’re in the midst of doing these maintenance tasks, wouldn’t it be great to show your users a nice maintenance page, instead of a broken site? With the Heroku maintenance mode, now you can.

This quick 3:30 video shows you how to use maintenance…