Adam Wiggins

Hi. I'm Adam Wiggins, cofounder and CTO of Heroku. Heroku has been my life’s work. Millions of apps depend on us, and I take that responsibility very personally. Recently, Heroku has faced criticism from the hacker community about how our HTTP router works, and about web performance on the platform in general. I’ve read all the public discussions, and have spent a lot of time over the past month talking with our customers about this subject. The concerns I've heard from you span past, present, and future. The past: some customers have hit serious problems with poor web performance and…

** THIS FEATURE IS NOW DEFUNCT ** If you’re building a customer-facing web app or mobile back-end, performance is a critical part of user experience. Fast is a feature, and affects everything from conversion rates to your site’s search ranking. The first step in performance tuning is getting visibility into the app’s web performance in production. For this, we turn to the app’s logs. Logs as data There are many ways to collect metrics, the most common being direct instrumentation into the app. New Relic, Librato, and Hosted Graphite are cloud services that use this approach, and there are numerous…

The Heroku Toolbelt is a package of the Heroku CLI, Foreman, and Git — all the tools you need to get started using Heroku at the command line. The Toolbelt is available as a native installer for OS X, Windows, and Debian/Ubuntu Linux. The Toolbelt has been available since last fall as part of our polyglot platform. Since then it's matured substantially with a huge amount of user testing, and now even has a shiny new landing page. Ruby developers can continue to use gem install heroku, but developers in other languages (Python, Java, Clojure, etc) will probably prefer not…

InfoWorld has named Heroku as a 2012 Technology of the Year. While we're not normally much for industry awards, we feel honored to be included alongside past winners such as the iPad, Android, Visual Studio, and Eclipse; and this year's winners, including Amazon Web Services, Node.js, Hadoop, CloudBees, and Heroku add-on provider Rhomobile. InfoWorld is a venerable publication in the technology world, and this is the first time they've given awards in the cloud space. We see this as another major point of validation for platform-as-a-service, and cloud technologies more generally. 2011 was the year that PaaS came into the…

The sixth official language on the Heroku polyglot platform is Scala, available in public beta on the Cedar stack starting today. Scala deftly blends object-oriented programming with functional programming. It offers an approachable syntax for Java and C developers, the power of a functional language like Erlang or Clojure, and the conciseness and programmer-friendliness normally found in scripting languages such as Ruby or Python. It has found traction with big-scale companies like Twitter and Foursquare, plus many others. Perhaps most notably, Scala offers a path forward for Java developers who seek a more modern programming language. More on those points…

Python has joined the growing ranks of officially-supported languages on Heroku's polyglot platform, going into public beta as of today. Python is the most-requested language for Heroku, and it brings with it the top-notch Django web framework. As a language, Python has much in common with Ruby, Heroku's origin language. But the Python community has its own unique character. Python has a culture which finds an ideal balance between fast-moving innovation and diligent caution. It emphasizes readability, minimizes "magic," treats documentation as a first-class concern, and has a tradition of well-tested, backward-compatible releases in both the core language and its…

We're delighted to announce that Facebook and Heroku have teamed up to bring you the fastest and easiest way to get your own Facebook app up and running in the cloud. Facebook apps have long been a major segment on the Heroku platform. From scrappy startups like Cardinal Blue to Hollywood giants like Warner Brothers, Heroku's scale-out capabilities and friction-free workflow enables these innovative companies to easily deliver great social experiences. Now, Facebook has created a fantastic new way to start building a live Facebook app instantly, powered by Heroku. A Quick Tour Start by going to Facebook Developers. Click…

We're pleased to announce the public beta of Heroku for Java. Java is the fourth official language available on the Cedar stack. Java is, by many measures, the world's most popular programming language. In addition to its large and diverse developer base, it offers a huge ecosystem of libraries and tools, an extremely well-tuned VM for fast and reliable runtime performance, and an accessible C-like syntax. But there are also many criticisms commonly leveled against the language. We'll take a closer look at Java's strengths and weaknesses in a moment, but first: Heroku for Java in 2 minutes Create a…

Programming languages are silos. The libraries, development tools, deployment practices, and even naming schemes associated with one language — say, Ruby — rarely have much carry-over to another language — say, Python, Erlang, Java, or C++. Professional programmers dedicate their careers to becoming experts in a particular language, making extensive personal investment in learning not only their chosen language's syntax and libraries, but also the ecosystem of tools and practices from that language's community. Similarly, companies build up codebases, deployment infrastructure, policies, and tacit knowledge in their engineering staff around a single language. Deep investment in a single general-purpose programming…

We're very excited to announce official support for Clojure, going into public beta as of today. Clojure is the third official language supported by Heroku, and is available on the Cedar stack. Clojure is a Lisp-like functional programming language which runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It offers powerful concurrency primitives based on immutable data structures, with emphasis on composability and correctness. The Clojure community is vibrant and growing quickly. More about Clojure in a moment, but first: Clojure on Heroku in 2 minutes Create a project with three files: project.clj (defproject hello-world "0.0.1" :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.2.1"] [ring/ring-jetty-adapter "0.3.9"]])…