UPDATE: This tutorial is for Play 1.x (an old version). Check out my Play 2 Tutorial if you want to get started with the latest stuff.
Last week Heroku announced that you can now run Java apps on Heroku. Today Heroku announced that you can also easily run Play Framework apps on Heroku! Here’s a quick guide to getting started with Play! on Heroku:
Today Heroku announced that Java is now supported on the Heroku Cloud Application Platform! This is incredibly exciting news and I’m very lucky to be a Heroku for Java Developer Evangelist!
Joining salesforce.com and jumping into the the Java Cloud space holds some nostalgia for me. When I began using Java in 1997 I was working at an ISP in Denver. We did the regular web hosting thing, but when the first Java Servlet engines (like Java Web Server 1.0) came out, I created the “wantjava.com” hosting service. Things were really nasty at first. We could only run one instance of the JWS on a server so I came up with a really bad way to do “multi-tenancy”. I setup a cron job to rsync the customers’ .class files into the server’s webapp and then restart the server. Customers had to email me to get a servlet added to the web.xml file. Uggg… I feel like I need to go to confession for this. But it worked and as the Servlet containers improved we quickly migrated to a more sustainable model.
In my new job at salesforce.com I’m incredibly exited about getting into Heroku, a Platform as a Service provider / Cloud Application Platform. In a future blog post I’ll provide more details on what Heroku is and how it works. But if you are like me the first thing you want to do when learning a new technology is to take it for a test drive. I decided to take my Heroku test drive using the recently announced Node.js support. I’m new to Node.js, but at least I know JavaScript. Heroku also offers Ruby / Rails support but I don’t know Ruby - yet. So let me walk you through the steps I took (and that you can follow) to get started with Node.js on the Heroku Cloud.