Heroku is a pure platform as a service -- that is, the entire infrastructure is managed by Heroku and not by you. As such, deploying a Ruby application, whether or not it is Rails based, is practically effortless. Deployment, in fact, is performed as a part of a regular SCM (software configuration management) sync via Git, an innovative, freely available, and quite popular distributed source code management system pioneered by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux.

Although code deployment might not be as easy with Engine Yard as with Heroku, the Engine Yard platform is dramatically more tunable. In fact, in many ways, Engine Yard is closer to an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) than a platform as a service (PaaS). Engine Yard provides a base infrastructure tuned to run Ruby applications, but the rest is up to you. Engine Yard does offer Git integration; however, deployment is not executed via a push, as in Heroku, but rather via Engine Yard's suite of tools and its extensive dashboard, which can sync with a Git repository.

In the world of Ruby development, there are two primary cloud-based, platform-as-a-service offerings: Engine Yard and Heroku. Both provide an easy-to-scale, managed hosting environment, both are built on Amazon EC2, and both have a long and intimate history with the Ruby community. Nevertheless, they offer contrasting approaches and features that will appeal to different audiences.

Platform-as-a-service cloud vendors Heroku and Engine Yard have been branching out to accommodate more developers by backing more programming languages.

Citing low usage trends and a priority on Java, builders of the NetBeans IDE have killed off Ruby on Rails support in a planned upgrade, the NetBeans community announced on Thursday.

Rubinius, an implementation of the Ruby programming language featuring enhancements for JIT (Just In Time) compilation and garbage collection, is being upgraded Friday, gaining improvements in debugging, memory usage, and performance.

Ruby on Rails 3.0, an upgrade to the popular open source Web framework that features a merger with the Merb framework, was released Sunday, the founder of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, said in a blog.

Engine Yard will extend on Thursday its services for cloud-based services for Ruby on Rails applications, giving users the option to deploy on Terremark infrastructure.

Adam Blum, CEO of startup Rhomobile, says 90% of the programs being written with his company's open source mobile application framework are by ISVs and the other 10% by enterprises, but over time he'd like to see those percentages reversed.

Komodo IDE 5 from ActiveState is the most comprehensive code editor and debugger available for enterprise teams that develop applications using a range of dynamic languages. Komodo's strong debugging skills are blended with broad-based coding support for Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, not to mention Tcl, Java, C, C++, Visual Basic, and many more. With powerful HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and XML support, Komodo is a great Web 2.0 companion as well.