Heroku Blog

How would you like to win $1 million in a hackathon? Seriously.

As you know, Heroku is part of the Salesforce Platform. A platform with a growing developer community and broad range of technologies that developers have used to create amazing solutions. So at Salesforce, we thought we’d cook up a little surprise. OK, a huge surprise: the world’s first hackathon with a single $1 million prize.

It’s on. Come to Dreamforce . Build a next­ generation mobile app. And win a million bucks. Really. What better way to say thank you to our developers than to…

Editor's Note: This is a guest post from Hursh Agrawal , co-founder of Branch.

At Branch, we’ve been through several feature launches on Branch and, more recently, several more on our new site, Potluck. Although it becomes easier, building high-quality, high-traffic web applications still isn’t easy. Here are a few things we’ve learned about hosting our apps on Heroku that have helped keep our latency down and our confidence up.

Building on Heroku

One thing that has been consistently helpful is not hosting services ourselves. Heroku provides a pretty extensive Add-on Marketplace…

We’re excited to announce that WebSocket functionality is now available on Heroku in public beta. We can’t wait to see the powerful and creative real-time apps you’ll build. In this post, we show how to get up and running with WebSockets and demonstrate the functionality with two sample apps you can get on GitHub. Editor’s Note: WebSockets support is now Generally Available . The heroku labs:enable websockets command is no longer required for the example app below.

Getting Started

For full documentation of WebSocket support on Heroku, visit the Dev Center .

WebSocket functionality is available as part…

Heroku is now using Extended Validation SSL Certificates for most of our Heroku-owned applications. This allows you to tell at a glance if an URL belongs to Heroku itself, or is merely hosted on us.

Applications in our legacy “Bamboo” stack are hosted under the heroku.com DNS domain, which has historically made it difficult for people to differentiate between Heroku-owned apps (e.g., id.heroku.com, dashboard.heroku.com) and customer applications. We believe the extra UI indication will prove useful in solving this problem.

-Tom Maher
Heroku Security Team

Heroku Postgres is Heroku’s database-as-a-service product. With Heroku Postgres, you can easily provision and scale a Postgres database for your Heroku application, or as a stand-alone service. Recently, we’ve blogged about PostgreSQL 9.3 on Heroku and how you can use Heroku Postgres dataclips to build awesome business dashboards with your data. In this post, we talk about how Heroku Postgres delivers continuous protection for your business data using WAL-E, an open source application for archiving PostgreSQL WAL (Write Ahead Log) files quickly, continuously and with a low operational burden.

About Continuous Protection

In order…