While we have focused on various key features of the Heroku platform in earlier chapters, we still have a very powerful aspect of the Heroku platform to uncover: the Heroku Labs. As the name suggests, Heroku Labs is an experimental environment - an advanced computing environment for researching and experimenting with potential features being considered for the Heroku feature set.

Heroku Labs provides an open ground for you to experiment with new capabilities and also test alternatives built to address fixes to the known limitations on the Heroku platform. For example, Heroku recently started supporting Websockets on Heroku (currently this feature is in public beta) for building performant real-time web apps on the Heroku platform. This is a completely new capability for the Heroku platform.

Earlier in this book, we learned and experimented with the currently available feature set of the Heroku platform. In this section, we will take a step further and look at...