News

We're pleased to announce the public beta of Heroku for Java. Java is the fourth official language available on the Cedar stack.

Java is, by many measures, the world's most popular programming language. In addition to its large and diverse developer base, it offers a huge ecosystem of libraries and tools, an extremely well-tuned VM for fast and reliable runtime performance, and an accessible C-like syntax.

But there are also many criticisms commonly leveled …

Programming languages are silos. The libraries, development tools, deployment practices, and even naming schemes associated with one language — say, Ruby — rarely have much carry-over to another language — say, Python, Erlang, Java, or C++.

Professional programmers dedicate their careers to becoming experts in a particular language, making extensive personal investment in learning not only their chosen language’s syntax and libraries, but also the ecosystem of tools and practices from that language’s …

The rails community is making the final push to get 3.1 out and is looking for your help! As part of a worldwide effort over the weekend, Heroku is hosting a local hackfest to help finalize Rails 3.1.

On Saturday, July 23rd from 12pm to 5pm, Heroku will be hosting a gathering for the Rails 3.1 Hackfest. We're looking for people that want to improve things at all levels of the Rails stack – …

Japanese version here (日本語版はこちら).

Today marks a very special occasion in the history of Heroku, as we are honored to announce that Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, has joined the Heroku team as Chief Architect, Ruby.

In 1993, a time when most programming languages were focussed on computational efficiency, Matz wanted to create a language focussed on developer experience, happiness, and productivity. This insight was years ahead of the trend …

英語版はこちら（English version here）。

本日は、Herokuの歴史において非常に特別な日です ―― Rubyの作者、まつもとゆきひろ氏、Matzを、RubyのチーフアーキテクトとしてHerokuに迎えることになったのです。

ほとんどのプログラミング言語が計算効率を重視していた1993年、Matzは開発者の作業環境、満足度、生産性に重点を置いた言語を生み出したいと考えました。この考えはアジャイル（俊敏な）ソフトウェアメソドロジというトレンドに数年先立つものでした（たとえば2001年に発行されたAgile Software Manifesto）。

このユニークな考えに基づき、Matzは美しくエレガントな言語を生み出しました。この言語の熱心な支持者の数は着実に増加し、David Heinemeier Hansson氏のWebフレームワークRuby on Railsと言った後押しもあり、ここ最近で急速に広がってきました。現在Rubyはコラボレーティブな真のオープンソース環境を実現し、数百の貢献者の支援を受ける強力なコミュニティとなっています。

Matzは言語としてのRubyのデザインだけでなく最も幅広く利用されているRubyの公式実装（Matz’s Ruby Interpreter, MRI）を推し進めてきましたが、今後もHerokuで少数精鋭のRubyコアグループと共にこの活動を続けていくことになります。

Herokuは多言語プラットフォームですが（現在公式にサポートしている言語はRuby、Node.js、Clojure）、Rubyはこれまでと変わらず最も好ましい言語の1つで、そのサポートに大規模な投資を続けていきます。

私たちは、Rubyが大好きです ―― これからもMatzとそのチームにこの言語のデザインとアーキテクトの発展に必要な人的資源・物的資源を提供することで、RubyコミュニティとRubyの「大先生」である同氏に少しでも還元していくことができればと考えています。

Herokuチーム

We're very excited to announce official support for Clojure, going into public beta as of today. Clojure is the third official language supported by Heroku, and is available on the Cedar stack.

Clojure is a Lisp-like functional programming language which runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It offers powerful concurrency primitives based on immutable data structures, with emphasis on composability and correctness. The Clojure community is vibrant and growing quickly.

More …

In 2006, I wrote Catapult: a Quicksilver-inspired command-line for the web. I deployed it to a VPS (Slicehost), then gave the URL out to a few friends. At some point I stopped using it, but some of my friends remained heavy users. Two years later, I got an email: the site was down.

Logging into the server with ssh, I discovered many small bits of breakage:

• The app's Mongrel process had crashed and not
…

Visibility and introspection capabilities are critical for managing and debugging real-world applications. But cloud platforms are often lacking when it comes to visibility. The magical black box is great when it "just works," but not so great when your app breaks and you can't look inside the box.

Standard introspection tools used in server-based deployments — such as ssh, ps aux, top, tail -f logfile, iostat — aren't valid in a multi-tenant cloud environment. We …

Node.js has gotten its share of press in the past year, achieving a level of attention some might call hype. Among its touted benefits are performance, high concurrency via a single-threaded event loop, and a parity between client-side and sever-side programming languages which offers the Promethean opportunity of making server-side programming accessible to front-end developers.

But what is Node.js, exactly? It's not a programming language – it's simply Javascript. It's not a VM: …

In the beginning was the command line. The command line is a direct and immediate channel for communicating with and controlling a computer. GUIs and menus are like pointing and gesturing to communicate; whereas the command line is akin to having a written conversation, with all the nuance and expressiveness of language.

This is not lost on developers, for whom the command prompt and blinking cursor represents the potential to run anything, to do anything. …