It took a few days to do it, but we did finally figure out how to write a Rails application that did REST access to its back-end instead of RDBMS access. Once it was written and working locally, deployment to OpenShift was fairly straightforward. Deployment to CloudFoundry took a bit longer, requiring us to learn how CloudFoundry worked and to work around some Ruby version mismatch issues, but it we got through it in a day or so. Dave Brauneis deployed the app on Heroku also without difficulty. OpenShift was a nicer experience in general than CloudFoundry. OpenShift has a nice web console where you can go and look at things, which CloudFoundry.com lacks - with CloudFoundry, the command-line tools are your only option. Also, OpenShift ran a sort of build and packaging script automatically for our Rails app while CloudFoundry gave us a list of instructions of things it wanted us to run locally before uploading. For a Rails application, at least, the experience was not quite as easy and slick as they advertise in the brochure, but it's something you can work through in a day or so.