Who doesn’t love peanut butter and chocolate? By themselves, they are equally delicious but together, they are irresistible!

The same can now be said about Heroku and Tropo.  Heroku is the super simple cloud hosting platform for Ruby and Ruby on Rails web applications.  While Tropo is the super simple cloud hosting platform for communications applications including Voice, SMS, IM, and Twitter.

While Tropo works with any web programming language, we have been seeing more and more Ruby applications being developed using Tropo’s WebAPI. Traditionally deploying an application took just about as much time as actually writing the application.  This is no longer true with Heroku’s cloud hosting platform.

Deploying a Ruby application to Heroku is as simple as issuing the following commands from your terminal window:

> heroku create

> git push heroku master

Equally as simple to deploying your application to Heroku is writing your multi-channel communications application using Tropo like this hello world application that can be accessed via the telephone using Voice or SMS or via Instant Message or Twitter:

answer

say “Yes, Tropo is this easy!”

hangup

Now on to the how-to video and Heroku deployment instructions located at http://tropo.heroku.com!

To demonstrate this yummy combination of technologies (Heroku and Tropo), Mark Silverberg (student and talented freelance Tropo developer) built a powerful Voice and IM application using Ruby and the Sinatra Framework and walks us through his 3.5 minute start-to-finish deployment of this application on the Heroku platform!

Mark’s multi-channel application is a volunteer finder service that provides information on volunteer opportunities in your zipcode.  The application can be accessed by calling +99000936 9991456957 via Skype or by IMing volunteer1234@tropo.im.  Mark’s Ruby code can be found on GitHub along with deployment instructions hosted on Heroku at http://warm-spring-38.heroku.com/

Now follow along with this video at http://tropo.heroku.com to learn how to build and deploy your next billion dollar idea using Heroku and Tropo!  Leveraging Heroku and Tropo gives you the best of advancements in cloud technology available today.  Heroku’s cloud technology allows you to scale your web application while Tropo’s cloud technology allows you to scale your communications applications.  These hybrid cloud technologies provide you, the web developer, with peace of mind and assurance that when your new application goes viral, we can easily scale to meet your demand.  Best of all, both cloud platforms offer free entry points to kick our tires and try us out.

So what are you waiting for?  Taste our peanut butter and chocolate now at Heroku and Tropo!