Chris Kemp - Professional Heroku Programming

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHRIS KEMP is a cloud architect, innovator, and entrepreneur with experience developing software in a number of languages. The bulk of his development experience is with PHP, Java, and the Salesforce Platform. He started a software development consultancy, Vandelay Enterprises, at the age of 15, developing applications, mostly on the LAMP stack, for customers around the world. Chris then moved to the fast-growing Toronto start-up, I Love Rewards (now Achievers), where he developed rewards and recognition software in PHP and Java, before joining Salesforce.com .

Chris currently works out of Salesforce.com s Toronto office, as a Senior Solution Engineer on the Advanced Technical Solutions team, an international team of trusted pre-sales advisors and architects. He is the worldwide leader of the Heroku Ambassador group, a team of leading Heroku experts in the company. Chris has developed a number of open source projects in Apex and Visualforce, including the wildly popular Cloud Swarm application. He is a named inventor on seven patent applications for innovations developed at Salesforce.com .

Chris holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science (Software Engineering specialist, 0T4) from the University of Toronto.

BRAD GYGER has extensive experience with various development platforms, including Heroku. Early in his career, he focused on Java application stacks at Sun Microsystems and then Oracle, and later migrated to the cloud, first working at platform provider Engine Yard, and then Heroku.

Brad currently leads the Customer Advocacy team at Heroku, where he is tasked with the success of customer applications running on the platform. This requires working knowledge of all supported application architectures, languages, frameworks, and tools within the Heroku universe. He works with customers on a daily basis to ensure that their applications are implemented optimally on the platform. During his career, Brad has worked with thousands of customer applications and made sure each one was as successful as possible.

Brad holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Indiana University. He and his family currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area.

ABOUT THE TECHNICAL EDITOR

GREG NOKES has more than 20 years of experience in systems engineering, ranging from designing wide area networks to helping high-traffic web applications scale successfully. He has successfully lead customer-facing as well as highly technical teams on a variety of projects. He is fluent in several technologies, including cutting-edge web application servers and deployment tools.

Currently, Greg is the Lead Technical Account Manager at Heroku, the premier PaaS provider. In this role, he helps a large and dynamic group of companies learn the best practices for optimizing their applications, as well as assists with technical and architectural advice.

Greg enjoys hiking, paintball, and soaking up the surroundings in the beautiful Puget Sound area of the Pacific Northwest.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE without the vision and incredible dedication from the uber-smart founders and team at Heroku in developing such an amazing technology and making it better every day. Salesforce.com s senior leadership team, especially Marc Benioff, must be thanked for bringing Heroku into the Salesforce.com family.

The team at Wiley, including Chris Webb, John Sleeva, Luann Rouff, Kate Parrett, Lorna Mein, and Ellie Scott, have done an outstanding job with all the hard work behind the scenes to make this book the best it can be. Greg Nokes has also done an incredible job in ensuring this books technical accuracy.

My co-author, Brad, deserves huge thanks for being so patient in teaching me the ins and outs of Heroku. You are truly an outstanding individual to work with. Your great efforts are massively appreciated. And were both crossing one item off of our bucket lists together!

I would not have had the opportunity to write this book were it not for the foresight of my manager, Richard Ho, and the support of the Sales Engineering management team at Salesforce.com , including Dominic Dinardo, Pat McQueen, Anne DelSanto, and Sandy Jones. Your leadership continues to inspire me to do great things every day. My colleagues have been so supportive throughout my career at Salesforce.com and deserve big thanks for that.

I also want to thank Will Tran and Craig Kerstiens for lending their Java and Heroku Postgres wisdom. A big thanks to my cousin, Adam Kemp, for lending me the family cottage and keeping me company while I wrote the bulk of this book; and to his dad, George, for his valuable legal advice. And thanks to all my friends for your encouragement and kind words.

The biggest thanks goes to Fiona, for your support and patience while I wrote this book; and to my family, who raised me and taught me just about everything I know. I can never thank you enough for all youve done for me throughout my life. This book is for you.

Chris

A BIG THANK YOU TO MY TEAMMATES at Heroku. It has been an inspiration to watch you create amazing things and empower our community with truly revolutionary technology. Your support and encouragement have been instrumental in the creation of this book. I hope we do Heroku proud.

I must thank my co-author, Chris. We met soon after Heroku joined the Salesforce.com family and clicked immediately. Its been a lot of fun creating with you, Chris, both within this book and on all those apps!

A quick thank you to our Technical Editor, Greg Nokes. Hes been a colleague for several years now, keeping me honest the whole time.

I also want to thank the people at Wiley, especially Chris Webb, John Sleeva, Luann Rouff, Kate Parrett, Lorna Mein, and Ellie Scott. You have all done a great job supporting Chris and me.

Most of all, I must thank my family. Your love and support has been instrumental in completing this book.

Brad

APPENDIX

Additional Resources

This appendix describes several useful websites that will help you as a Heroku developer. Some sites provide additional content that is useful for continued learning. Other sites offer a community of Heroku developers and experts with whom those new to the platform can interact. Some are simply sites that Heroku developers should be aware of to keep track of changes and updates to the ever-improving Heroku platform.

www.heroku.com

If you have gotten this far in the book, you have already been to this site many times. Its your first stop for logging in to Heroku and provides important information. Want to find out about Herokus pricing? Check out the pricing page ( www.heroku.com/pricing#0-0 ). To find out how to contact the folks at Heroku, see the contact information page ( www.heroku.com/contact ).

Now that youre a Heroku expert and realize how awesome Heroku really is, perhaps you would like to work there. For information on working at Heroku and a list of available positions, check out the jobs page ( http://jobs.heroku.com/ ). Want to dive deeper into Herokus legal or privacy policies? There are legal ( http://policy.heroku.com/promise ) and privacy ( http://policy.heroku.com/privacy ) policy pages there, too.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/

The Heroku Dev Center is your one-stop shop for all things Heroku. Whenever you need a reference for a particular command, APIs, or the tools you can use for building Heroku apps, the reference section is the place to be. You can also find a number of useful tutorials for different languages, frameworks, and types of apps (e.g., Facebook, mobile, etc.). In-depth language-specific information is also available.