My ride with Rails was quiet rough. Look PHP was built for web programming and it rocked. There were about 30 million websites running on PHP, and its still rising. When it comes to the thing of makin websites, PHP is the King. No doubt.

Then I struck about this Rails. And boy Ruby was blastingly easy. You can learn it within an hour. Get the Chris Pine book on Ruby, or if you drink vodka, see my book on Ruby programming. then I started to read Rails. God I failed. I failed, I failed and it was the 11th time I picked up. Two quick and dirty apps with two clients and I was still no where.

Then it came to Rails hosting, I was killed. Going behind host after host, I was let down. Every one seemed to offer Rails hosting and doesn’t seem to support it. Site5.com promised support but I bet, their team has no idea what Rub or Rails is.

Then this heroku. I didn’t like Heroku because its on cloud and we do not have absolute fine grained control. The deployment was zap. You created application and it was deployed on Heroku. Thanks to their wonderful gem.

I still don’t 100% understand how cloud hosting really works. But when it comes to delivering on time to the client, heroku is the best. At fist hostin is free and you are charged if you want more resources. Yes heroku is pricey, but it removes headaches. If many go to pay heroku, then it might reduce cost. Who knows?

There are some constrains. You can’t store files on heroku. To overcome that you can use herofu gem or go on building apps that store stuff on Amazon S3. The support by heroku is super. In Ruby on Rails forum, in Heroku Google group or even if you put it on twitter, some one from heroku will monitor and answer you.

I think the future of web programming is Ruby on Rails and the future of hostin is Heroku style. somewhere in the Heroku apes is the moon-walker, I can sense that.