Heroku is a pure platform as a service -- that is, the entire infrastructure is managed by Heroku and not by you. As such, deploying a Ruby application, whether or not it is Rails based, is practically effortless. Deployment, in fact, is performed as a part of a regular SCM (software configuration management) sync via Git, an innovative, freely available, and quite popular distributed source code management system pioneered by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux.

Although code deployment might not be as easy with Engine Yard as with Heroku, the Engine Yard platform is dramatically more tunable. In fact, in many ways, Engine Yard is closer to an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) than a platform as a service (PaaS). Engine Yard provides a base infrastructure tuned to run Ruby applications, but the rest is up to you. Engine Yard does offer Git integration; however, deployment is not executed via a push, as in Heroku, but rather via Engine Yard's suite of tools and its extensive dashboard, which can sync with a Git repository.

In the world of Ruby development, there are two primary cloud-based, platform-as-a-service offerings: Engine Yard and Heroku. Both provide an easy-to-scale, managed hosting environment, both are built on Amazon EC2, and both have a long and intimate history with the Ruby community. Nevertheless, they offer contrasting approaches and features that will appeal to different audiences.

Platform-as-a-service cloud vendors Heroku and Engine Yard have been branching out to accommodate more developers by backing more programming languages.

Citing low usage trends and a priority on Java, builders of the NetBeans IDE have killed off Ruby on Rails support in a planned upgrade, the NetBeans community announced on Thursday.

Web application development reached a new paradigm with the release of Ruby on Rails back in 2004. Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson has since been at the helm of one of the most successful and popular open source software development projects. Ruby on Rails, or just Rails, has allowed thousands of developers to create complex applications rapidly in a consistent manner. Open Source Identity catches up David Heinemeier Hansson to find out what the early days of Rails was like and what the future holds.