I signed up for the Heroku beta and got in months ago. It was fun to kick the tires, but I never did more than that. The web interface to edit your application is indeed a technical feat, I’d much rather develop with the tools I know and love. Heroku sort of got pushed off in the back of my mind. Today I came across an article talking about playing with heroku by Josh Nichols at his blog Technical Pickles.
Digging around proved that I never did subscribe to the Heroku blog and that it was time to give it another spin. I’ll refer you to the above article for a good overview of the new features. The skinny is that there is a Heroku gem that allows you to interact with your account. Then you can use it to create a local git repository of an application. After editing locally, committing and pushing your changes Heroku will update your application, run any migrations and restart the mongrel process. This certainly make Heroku more appealing to investigate further. The best part is that with git and rails you aren’t necessarily tied to them, should their eventual pricing plans not suit your tastes.