This should put a hop in the step of all those Heroku-for-Django startups.
Sign up to try it out... http://djangozoom.com :)
Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
81–90 of 205 posts
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#82This should put a hop in the step of all those Heroku-for-Django startups.
Except that Heroku for Django in the long term is likely to be Heroku (given they've said in the past they plan to expand to other languages).
Then they better get some hardcore Django people onboard. The reason (well, one of the reasons) that Heroku was so successful was that the top people were Ruby hackers themselves.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#83This should put a hop in the step of all those Heroku-for-Django startups.
I thought that was Google App Engine?
GAE looks like this at first glance. But it turns out to be focused 90% on scalability, and 10% on easy deployment. The main issue for Django developers is that on GAE, you're using a nonrelational database. Assumptions about the RDBMS run deep in Django and in most Django apps, and great effort (see django-nonrel) is required to present even the thinnest veneer of compatibility.
In my experience (>2 years of GAE consulting for paying clients) I think using GAE is probably the wrong choice for most new projects. If you're new, you need to be able to iterate ideas quickly and you will value tools that (1) give you flexibility, (2) offer a lot of useful reusable libraries, and (3) have a large and stable culture (good docs, stable APIs, people you can hire). And if you have a scalability challenge somewhere down the road, it would make perfect sense to rewrite most of your app on a platform like GAE -- after all, by that point you'll have the basics of design quite solid, so you don't need as much flexibility, and every other part of the effort gets easier when you have money to throw at it.
It is a common misconception, though, that AppEngine serves the same needs as Heroku, or is a Heroku equivalent for Django. I think that's the main reason we didn't see more Herokus-for-Django* earlier.
*Disclaimer: I am a founder of http://djangozoom.com/ .
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#84I can see EngineYard opening a bottle to celebrate as well, $212M in 'mostly stock' would be landing a big one, to be landing it in cash is very good indeed. Congratulations to everybody, especially to the people that brokered the deal on Herokus side, very impressive. In other news, registrars the world over report a large uptick in domain registrations around the twin themes of rails hosting and sushi...
I can see Linode opening a bottle to celebrate too :)
Are they related or linked to this deal?
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#85i always thought heroku was the best-designed site i've ever seen
Sometimes when I'm feeling down I visit https://api.heroku.com/login and enjoy the sunset :~)
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#86It comes out to about $2000 per ap hosted on Heroku. Pretty good considering most of those aps are probably free. Of course they are hoping for growth, and Heroku has been adding almost a hundred apps per day.
If my "app" on Heroku is counted in that hosted app number, then people must assign a lot of value to a one page web app that simply states "welcomes to rails." I suspect there are other apps on the service that compete direectly with mine.
I have my account filled with tiny apps that barely do anything from when I was making apps to learn rails. There should be a ton of people like this too.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#87Congrats to the Heroku guys! P.S: Now what happens to the free app quota?
Given AWS just announced a free-tier, I imagine Salesforce will want to keep the free app quota to remain competitive.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#88This is great news for everyone in the general cloud infrastructure space too -- expanding the number of viable potential acquirers for startups.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#89I interviewed with Salesforce and I have to tell you that I found their culture a bit ....weird. It's something I couldn't put my finger on but I just had the feeling that they were all in some sort of cult or something. I didn't get the job. Probably a good thing.
The cult of enterprise solutions.
It wasn't that.
The office in the area I was looking at was SMALL. That wasn't so much an issue but the vibe of the place was almost like a library.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#90Lots of wellwishers in the Heroku IRC channel this morning...