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I tested Heroku today. Heroku is a project for online development and hosting of Ruby on Rails applications. All configuration, development and settings are controlled with a nice web interface.

The application is live and accessible right after you created it.

Easy Configuration

In the basic settings you can customize the name of the subdomain, as well as the visibility of your project (public or private).

Import/Export Features

One cool feature is that Heroku lets you import existing rails applications, simply by uploading a tarball, and of course, exporting is supported too.

For Backup purposes you can even create multiple Snapshots of your current project which are then stored serverside.

Collaboration

It is possible to add multiple collaborators to projects through their email addresses, this can be very handy as a quick development platform for small groups, training, presentations or discussion.

Online Development

The Edit Mode of your applications offers a nice interface divided into 3 sections:

• Code View, has a fully functional, web-based editor that lets you edit the project files as well as basic filemanagement tasks and access to Generators, Rake tasks and even the Console.

• Data view, provides an interface to the project database

• Log view, well the logfiles :)

Although I think I won’t develop full applications in Heroku, I think it is very handy for a couple of tasks:

• upload and share existing applications very quickly
• present or discuss applications online (eg. for training purposes)
• work with various people through a nice web interface

Heroku is definitely worth a try, check it out.