Chapter 1, Hello Heroku, introduces you to the world of Heroku. It also provides a historical background on how Heroku evolved to what it is today followed by a basic understanding of Heroku's architecture. Finally, it takes you on a test drive to get a firsthand experience with the Heroku cloud platform.

Chapter 2, Inside Heroku, covers the foundational aspects of the Heroku platform. It covers the details of various components of the Heroku architecture, including the Heroku platform stack, the request routing system, the Logplex logging framework, the add-ons, the dyno (process), and the platform API.

Chapter 3, Building Heroku Applications, covers the principles governing building web apps on the Heroku platform. It also illustrates the process of building and configuring web apps besides covering the steps involved in preparing a production-ready app from your code using language-specific buildpacks.

Chapter 4, Deploying Heroku Applications, describes the application deployment process on the Heroku platform. It covers the basics of the Git distributed version control system and illustrates the most common source management operations. It also covers the concept of forking and cloning apps besides ways to optimize your app deployment. It also showcases various aspects of Heroku app release management process through illustrative examples.

Chapter 5, Running Heroku Applications, illustrates the process of running a Heroku cloud app in detail. It covers the Heroku command-line interface (CLI) used to perform Heroku operations such as creating or updating apps. It also explains how to use the Foreman tool to troubleshoot the apps locally before deploying them to the Heroku cloud. Additionally, it describes the key features of the Heroku dashboard related to running Heroku apps.

Chapter 6, Putting It All Together, sums up the learning about the foundations of the Heroku platform and illustrates the whole process of building, deploying, and managing Heroku apps using Java on the Eclipse app development platform.

Chapter 7, Heroku Best Practices, covers the details of best practices that developers can use not only to deploy but also to write apps on the cloud using the Cloud 9 cloud-based integrated development environment. This chapter also provides detailed coverage of best practices such as setting up the Heroku PostgreSQL database, configuring DNS for your web app, and optimizing applications to use higher end services provided by the Heroku platform.

Chapter 8, Heroku Security, covers two parts of the Heroku security puzzle—the developer communication with the Heroku platform and securing the Heroku platform from malicious attacks from the external world.

Chapter 9, Troubleshooting Heroku Applications, describes the techniques developers can employ to fix problems encountered while developing apps for the Heroku platform. It covers how to troubleshoot application downtimes, isolates HTTP request issues, debugs database problems, and runs production checks to warn you about potential issues. It also shows how you can use the maintenance windows to gracefully handle app upgrades.

Chapter 10, Advanced Heroku Usage, introduces the advanced features of Heroku. It covers the Heroku Labs feature, including Websockets, illustrates the Heroku Platform API through practical examples, and shows how developers can do social coding using the collaborative features of the Heroku dashboard.

The software needed for this book includes the Heroku toolbelt (client) (https://toolbelt.heroku.com), Eclipse IDE for EE, the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and the curl tool.

This book is for application developers who are looking to learn cloud application development using the Heroku platform. Knowledge of Ruby and Java is desirable. Previous knowledge of the Ubuntu OS is helpful though not mandatory.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Use the ps:scale command to scale up the web processes."

A block of code is set as follows:

#!/bin/sh

cat << EOF
---
addons:
  - heroku-postgresql:dev
default_process_types:
  web: bin/node server.js
EOF

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ heroku create myapp --buildpack https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-mylang

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "You can also restart a web application using the Restart button on the Processes tab of your web app."

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