I want you to pretend for a minute that I'm a programmer.
No I'm not just a programmer I'm a developer.
I've got an idea for a new kind of web application that everybody's going to go crazy over the next
Dropbox.
It's it's it's the next G-mail I don't know but I love this thing.
Now keep in mind that I'm a programmer.
OK.
And that's what I do.
I write programs and I've got this dream.
But for me as a programmer to go through the process of setting this up I have to be setting up servers
and I'd have to have lots of administrators to protect all my systems and people running backups and
then I would need people grabbing stuff for me help and my development didn't need this.
It's a big deal for somebody like me to get my dream out there.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could create a magic little world where me as a programmer.
All I see is a a platform a basically a screen that allows me to write my code and not only write my
code but have access to big software libraries that I need to help write my code that will help keep
track of my development for me.
And then when I got it and I want to see how it works all I can do is press a button and say deploy
and it magically appears on a server that's completely configured and ready to go at all I have to do
is type in w w w that.
Check out my cool site dotcom and see how it's do it.
Sounds fun.
Well that my friends is platform as a service platform as a service will usually be some infrastructure
as a service aspect to it but that doesn't mean anything to me as a programmer.
I don't care about what the internal LAN IP addresses for a server I don't even care if I have the servers
or how many or what kind of RAM they have I don't care what kind of operating systems running on my
machines.
I don't really care what's on the firewall that that's all another world and I don't want to deal with
all that.
And that's what platform as a service is all about a cozy little cuddly world where developers can create
amazing web applications.
OK.
More than web applications.
But that's the best way to think about this stuff.
And they can make these Web applications and press a button that all goes and everything's taken care
of for them and they all live happily ever after to appreciate the platform as a service.
I need to show you it.
Let's take a look at one of the more popular ones.
Heroku All right.
Now this is the Heroku dashboard.
It's a little bit boring to look at right now.
Right now I have one application that's up there I don't want to mess with it.
That one's actually working for a living.
But what I do have is here on my computer here I've got this application.
Now this is a little teeny tiny javascript application and the only thing it does is puts the word hello
world up on the screen.
But this could be a complete application this could be read it for example.
So if you're familiar with the Reddit website so I can do any kind of code that I want and what I'm
going to do in one shot is using Heroku.
I'm going to take my code I'm going to upload it to Heroku.
It's going to get everything configured is going to bring along libraries is going to check my code
it's going to start anything that needs to be started.
And it's actually going to give it a real U R L so it can post up and we can check it out and we can
deploy this thing pretty much in the press of one button.
So let's go ahead and get started.
OK so here's my code then there's nothing too terribly exciting about my code all it's going to do is
say hello world.
But just so you know we look and explore here you can see it's on my desktop under a folder called node
dash J J.S. dash sample so you can see there's files and there's folders We need all this to run Java
JavaScript So let me go in and close that and I'll minimize this guy.
And what we're going to do is bring it up.
So we're going to go ahead and we're going to create a new app and we call it Fred.
Now what's interesting here Samadi are you ready used Fred.
So I can go ahead and do it graphically.
But what's really interesting about Heroku is that most of this stuff is actually done from a command
prompt.
So if you want to use Heroku Well you could bring it in from Dropbox or anything else but all the hip
kids will actually install a Heroku tool kit which will add command line utilities to let them do all
the work.
So in order for me to make this happen I need to open up a command prompt and run a few commands.
Right so here I am.
And if you remember this is desktop and that's the folder name.
So
first thing I'm going to do is create
the app
OK.
Now look really close.
It has created the application which is really just basically made a container for it up on Heroku but
it already tells me now what the hell's going to be for the site.
And this other one is used for something called a get which we can use to load stuff up.
And I'm actually going to use that now.
No titles.
So I'm going to use this get command.
And this is actually going to send all my files up.
It's going to send my files up.
It's going to create the web site and get everything started.
Okay now if I've done everything right I now have a couple of commands and actually set up a complete
website that runs my code.
So what I'm going to do now is of course Heroku has another command line that allow me to actually open
up a browser and check out my new web app
Tenna.
There it is.
Hello world.
Notice first of all that I've got an actual u r l it's under Heroku app dot com so they can make all
these that they want but I'm legitimately up on the Internet and I can test this out do whatever I need
to do.
There are people who use this as an ongoing basis as I bring in new versions that takes care of everything
for me.
And that's the power of what platform as a service does for me.
I don't really care much about servers or anything like that.
Now let's say the Web sites were a little slow.
Oracle lets me take care of that too.
OK.
So here's the app that I created.
Then you can click on this.
So let's say I want to build up a sequel server because I need a sequel server in the old days I would
have to actually get a sequel server installed get it up and running with Heroku.
I can just put in these add ons and there are zillions of add ons for all kinds of stuff.
And see and isn't.
So I'm a big fan of post Grace so I can actually just click on this if I want to and I've load myself
in a complete sequel server just by going click.
But we don't need any add ons for the simple app.
Now the other thing that's interesting here what they called Duyne knows C programmers don't care about.
Do we have enough web servers to do whatever we're going to do.
Well I'm sure they care but only so far as they make sure that their application is running well.
So let's say I deploy this and I got it up and running and it seems sluggish.
Well it's no big deal with Heroku all I need to do is add more Didos.
Now they cost more money as you add more but I add more Dido's until my applications running well and
it's pretty trivial stuff.
The beauty of platform as a service is that everything is avise skated as a programmer.
I don't even see the servers.
I don't see anything that I don't want to see other than my beautiful code running beautifully in its
own little you are el
in
in.