AppHarbor add-on provider newsletter

Dear AppHarbor Add-on Provider

This is a quick update on recent improvements to the AppHarbor add-on
program. There's one important announcement (we'll be adding support
for running apps in the EU) and a bunch of nice-to-have info.

We want you to know that add-ons on AppHarbor are a big part of what
makes our platform awesome and we're extremely happy that you're in
the catalog. We're committed to your add-on's success on AppHarbor.
Please get in touch if you have questions, comments or requests.

# EU region support

We'll be adding support for running AppHarbor apps in the EU really
soon, but please don't tell anyone. EU applications will be running in
the eu-west AWS region. Moving apps between regions is not supported.

To let add-on providers know where the app provisioning an add-on is
located, we have extended the Heroku provisioning API slightly. We now
provide a `region` parameter in the provision request. Previously,
we've always sent you `amazon-web-services::us-east-1` as the region.
After the EU launch, both `amazon-web-services::us-east-1` and
`amazon-web-services::eu-west-1` are valid values.

It's up to you, the add-on provider, whether you want to take
advantage of region information in the provision request. If your
add-on is not latency-sensitive (email, etc.), it's probably safe to
ignore it. If your add-on is latency sensitive and you're currently
running your service in eu-west, we -- and our users -- would
appreciate it if the requested resource was provisioned in eu-west for
provision-requests specifying `amazon-web-services::eu-west-1` as the
region.

If you're not running infrastructure in eu-west and you don't think
your add-on is usable from the eu-west data center (or maybe you don't
want to incur ingress/outgress bandwidth charges), you can respond
with HTTP 422 or 503 and a message in the response body, something
like this: { "message": "eu-west not supported, sorry" }

In the add-on provider dashboard
(https://appharbor.com/addonprovider), you can specify which regions
your add-ons support. If your add-on is not region-sensitive, you
should specify support for all regions. AppHarbor users can provision
your add-on to apps running in unsupported regions but we'll display a
warning to let them know that performance might not be optimal. If
your add-on supports the current application region for an app that a
user is about to provision your add-on to, no warning will be
displayed.

The default is for an add-on to support us-east. Go to
https://appharbor.com/addonprovider to change this.

# Send emails to users

You can now send emails to users who have provisioned your add-on. You
can either query our API using the callback_url to get `owner_email`
or you can just send emails to the `heroku_id` you get in the
provision call. In fact, `owner_email` and `heroku_id` are the same
value. We won't give you the actual user email address, but emails
will be forwarded to the email address currently registered for the
application owner. This ensures that the user will always be sent
emails from you to the most recent address that we have on file for
that user.

Please send only emails relevant to the add-on user to these addresses.

# Assorted improvements

The add-on dashboard (https://appharbor.com/addonprovider) has gotten
lots of incremental improvements and you can modify all aspects of
your add-on, including adding, removing and updating plans and
changing prices, changing descriptions and changing endpoint urls. If
you haven't done so in a while, please go and make sure your add-on
looks it's absolute best: https://appharbor.com/addonprovider

# Statements

Add-on provider statements are now available from the add-on
dashboard: https://appharbor.com/addonprovider

Let us know whether you want us to cut you a check or set up a wire
transfer or whether the owed amount is currently not large enough to
trouble our respective accountants.

# Post-based SSO

We have added support for the updated Heroku POST-based
single-sign-on. If you specify an SSO-endpoint in the add-on dashboard
(https://appharbor.com/addonprovider) then that will be used when
logging in users from AppHarbor.

You can also query the state of all instances of your add-on
provisioned on AppHarbor using this resource:
https://appharbor.com/addons/{addon}/resources/

Check out the rest of the documentation here:
http://support.appharbor.com/kb/add-ons/building-an-appharbor-add-on

# What the future holds

We're working on various improvements to the add-on program including
sharing an add-on between multiple AppHarbor applications and adding
multiple instances of the same add-on to one application. For the
latter case, we'll disallow adding multiple instances of any free plan
your add-on might have.

Regards
The AppHarbor Team