Heroku

Akka, Heroku, sbt and BlueEyes at the SF Scala UG

Next Monday at the San Francisco Scala User Group I will be co-presenting about Akka, Heroku, sbt and BlueEyes with Mike Slinn - a long time friend and mentor. In the presentation we will be talking about a building client/server apps with HTML5 on the client and Scala & JSON services on the server. We will also show how to deploy these applications on the cloud with Heroku. Hope to see you there!

Heroku Java User Group Tour Part 1: Los Angeles and Salt Lake City

This week I’m starting a Java User Group tour where I’ll be travelling to JUGs around the US (or maybe world). On the tour I’ll be giving a talk about Running Java, Play! and Scala Apps on the Cloud. Here is the description:

Heroku is a Polyglot Cloud Application Platform that makes it easy to deploy Java, Play! and Scala apps on the cloud. Deployment is as simple as doing a “git push”. This session will teach you how to instantly deploy and scale Java, Play! and Scala apps on Heroku.

Heroku is Hiring

It’s been four months since I started working at Heroku as a Developer Evangelist. Now it is clear to me that I got really lucky. Heroku is a top-notch place to work. The product is sexy. The people are all rock stars. Heroku is owned by Salesforce.com so there is the stability of a large company but the start-up culture remains in place.

Heroku is looking to hire lots of people (engineers, marketing, etc) but of particular interest to my readers might be the Java Developer Evangelist position. Come work with me to help educate Java developers about Heroku!

Getting Started with Scala on Heroku

Over the past year I’ve been gradually learning Scala and I think it’s fantastic! So I’m incredibly excited that Scala now runs on Heroku! Of course you can use the standard Java on Heroku / Maven method of running Scala on Heroku. But as of today you can also use sbt (the Scala Build Tool) to run Scala apps on Heroku. If you are new to Heroku, it is a Polyglot Cloud Application Platform. Put very simply:

Sending Play Framework File Uploads to Amazon S3

UPDATE: I’ve released a S3 Play Module based on this project.

A couple of questions [1, 2] on StackOverflow.com led me to look into how we can send file uploads in a Play Framework application to Amazon S3 instead of the local disk. For applications running on Heroku this is especially important because the local disk is not persistent. Persistent disk storage makes it hard to scale apps. Instead of using the file system, it’s better to use an external service which is independent of the web tier.