Heroku for Java

I know, when you think Heroku, you think Ruby. But they do support other languages. And they’ve just added their 4th. It’s a new language called Java. No, that’s not quite right, is it?

What are they doing adding Java to the mix at this late date? They’ve actually got a pretty interesting explanation of their thinking on that announcement page. If you scroll down to the section (with no index tag, grrr) labeled “How J2EE Derailed Java”, there’s a pretty good discussion of some of the missteps Java’s made over the years, and why Heroku still thinks it’s worth adding to their mix. An important part of this is that they’re doing their own deployment model which is substantially simpler than what you’re used to from J2EE. And they do discuss the other obvious reason for supporting it. That’s the currently hot trend of other JVM languages like Scala and JRuby.

Interesting read if you’re interested in Java. Go check it out on their blog.