Am I the only one who wasn't aware that Heroku announced support for PHP?
I can't find it on the site right and was surprised also.
Facebook and Heroku
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#32Am I the only one who wasn't aware that Heroku announced support for PHP?
They are only allowing Python and PHP for facebook apps right now. So no, you didn't miss it as it didn't happen.
Today's announcement probably means it will happen in the near future though.
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably that the cheap plans are on shared DBs and it's very expensive to use dedicated DBs and the dedicated boxes appear to be single instances of Postgres. I'm not complaining, but what is the official Heroku approach to things like DB sharding, etc.
They actually have a very impressive dedicated database service: https://postgres.heroku.com/ It supports scaling vertically by throwing in more cache, faster CPU, etc. Once you outgrow that, it supports horizontal scaling by replicating to read-only slaves.
I'm aware as we are running on heroku here, but it gets expensive quick and your options are more limited than if you roll your own. Then again, that goes for the whole platform.
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what makes you think our data services aren't reliable or scalable?
I'll jump in here, since you asked. Bad timing. About 2 hours ago we started getting these completely abstract errors 15 minutes before we were due to present to some VC folks: 2011-09-15T18:34:33+00:00 heroku[router]: Error H12 (Request timeout) -> GET [redacted]-staging.heroku.com/ dyno=web.1 queue= wait= service=30000ms status=503 bytes=0 I have absolutely no indication what part of our stack is having trouble. Af…
Did you try contacting support? Looking at that log line, I can tell you that it looks like your app took too long to respond to the request (service=30000ms) and our routing mesh timed it out (status=503, Error H12 (Request timeout).
If there's anything we can help with, definitely get in touch. Our support team is top notch.
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#35This seems great. I know Facebook is switching (or has switched) to requiring 3rd party apps to use an SSL certificate. Since many of the Facebook apps I've been developing don't really require much (many times they're just informational pages, no user input) it seems like a waste to buy a full domain and SSL cert. Being able to just use Heroku's domain and piggyback SSL could be a big win there.
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll jump in here, since you asked. Bad timing. About 2 hours ago we started getting these completely abstract errors 15 minutes before we were due to present to some VC folks: 2011-09-15T18:34:33+00:00 heroku[router]: Error H12 (Request timeout) -> GET [redacted]-staging.heroku.com/ dyno=web.1 queue= wait= service=30000ms status=503 bytes=0 I have absolutely no indication what part of our stack is having trouble. Af…
Are you on the shared hosting DB plan? Are you using more than 1 dyno? We are running 4 dynos, 2 workers, and the Ronin DB plan and we haven't had any problems other than a 10 minute downtime due to a bad deploy by Heroku.
Just eyeballing it we have about 40-50 apps using the shared DB. We don't have any dedicated DB stuff with Heroku, but we use varying dynos levels. (Most apps idle at 1, though.)
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#37Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed…
Totally agree. I don't think too many Facebook app vendors are worrying about scaling.
If Facebook wants to get more developers to embrace their dying platform (when was the last time you heard about an exciting new FB app?), they'll need to silence the voices screaming from every corner of the Internet about their lame documentation and support.
Buy as usual, instead they do a song and dance announcing a new initiative and then completely forget about it, like their Stack Overflow support system which does not seem to have nearly enough participation from actual Facebook employees who can answer questions.
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#38Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed…
One of the major pains when writing facebook apps is that their documentation is either incorrect, out of date or non-existant.
If you create a facebook app using heroku, it looks like you get something akin to a facebook-boilerplate app that is already deployed.
I would imagine the people at Heroku / Facebook spending some effort in keeping their boilerplate app / demo up to date with any api changes that may occur.
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#39Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed…
You're right. I work full time on Facebook Applications and there are several things hindering the FB Platform. First is the lack of moderation of apps. Secondly, the approved advertiser list has too many companies promoting mobile offers (which are spammy) (http://developers.facebook.com/adproviders/). As a consequence Application ads are seedy. Think 'You have 1 new message' type ads, or "Are you smarter than Obama" type ads. Thirdly, the whole Permissions/Authentication system needs to be improved. The Permissions wall in its current embodiment advertise the negatives of adding an Application.
Even if you disagree with the above, you should agree that an API that accounts for 10% of a site's traffic, like Facebook's, is a struggling ecosystem. Src: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-news-feed-apps-2011-...
Re: Facebook and Heroku
#40Ok, I'll be the mean one. While I am happy for heroky and everything, I am not sure why this move matters. Was hosting what was holding back the facebook app ecosystem? I was under the impression that the only successes there were Zynga and.. i'm sure there's others? Modernising hosting and support is great, but I thought it was the inconsistent policies and favouritism, and maybe the nature of the medium that killed…
Well, as we saw with iOS, inconsistent policies and favouritism don't necessarily kill a platform.
I think this is a big deal because the law of demand is a big deal. What the Facebook/Heroku partnership means is that if I'm some 19 year old with a cool idea, I don't need money or experience in hosting, I just have to write the code to do it. Calling that "modernising" is missing the point entirely.
To return to the iOS analogy, there were a lot of people who said "well, yeah, so Apple made an integrated platform for developing and selling software - but what does that get us that we didn't have before?" The answer to that question depends on whether you consider $1.7 billion in revenue novel or not.