1. Deploying with Heroku

2. Heroku is… A cloud platform service:
A Platform as a Service, which is often simply referred to as PaaS, a category of cloud computing that provides a platform and environment to allow developers to build applications and services over the internet. PaaS services are hosted in the cloud and accessed by users simply via their web browser.
Some alternative services:
OpenShift by Red Hat – open source
Cloud Foundry – open source
Amazon Web Services – pretty spendy and not easy
Google App Engine – open source
HP Cloud Services – not open source
Flynn – open source (super young)
etcetcetcetc

3. (psst -- details down below)
Heroku how it works…
It’s magic!!!!!!
ok…not really.
(psst -- details down below)
When you create an app on Heroku, it deploys to the Cedar Stack, an online runtime environment that supports apps built in Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python and PHP—all the programming languages that Heroku supports.
When you deploy a new app, Heroku assigns it a unique name based on a natural theme, like “calm-springs3345” or “desolate-cliffs1221.”
One of the reasons Heroku is easy for people to use is that it relies widely on Git to manage your app code.
The “push” command, “Heroku push master,” is what you input on the command line to send the app from your repository to the cloud. That’s why Heroku is considered a “one click” deploy.
In addition to Git deployment, Heroku supports building and releasing apps via an API

4. Deploying Java on Heroku using commandline
What you will need:
A free Heroku account
Java installed
Maven 3 installed
Heroku recognizes an app as Java by the existence of the pom.xml file which is used by Java’s dependency manager, Maven.
Pushing local changes is pretty simple with a tweak of the pom.xml file if needed to include additional dependencies

5. Resources https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku-works