New Beta Workbench Instance Running on Heroku

[Ryan Brainard]

I'm happy to announce that the first cut of Workbench 24.0.1 is now available! While the last release had limited support for running Workbench on Heroku, this release has been all about getting Workbench ready for running at full production scale and turning Workbench into a true 12-Factor App. That means:

• Ability to scale out the dynos with Redis-backed sessions
• More secure and lighter weight sessions
• Enforcement and auto-forwarding to HTTPS
• Remote terms files
• Dynamic control of static resource caching
  
• JSON-based, machine readable logs that can be read as streams
• Enhancements to the Heroku Phing Buildpack to support Redis, static resource caching (via mod_expires and mod_headers), and streamed app logging

Eventually, I'd like to have the public Workbench instance at workbench.developerforce.com running completely on Heroku, but while we are still ironing out the wrinkles, I need your help. Workbench 24.0.1 Beta 1 has been deployed to https://forceworkbench.herokuapp.com and encourage you try it out and report back any feedback. Please remember this is all in beta, so don't rely on it for anything misson critical just yet. If all goes well, change will allow for more frequent and seamless upgrades, better backend monitoring, and most importantly, virtually unlimited scalability.

Workbench still has full support for running locally or on any web server, and these enhancements make it more scalable on any platform. To run Workbench locally, download 24.0.1 here:

http://code.google.com/p/forceworkbench/downloads

Thanks,

Ryan