Facebook partners with Heroku for apps in the cloud

Developers can now host their services on Heroku's platform, rapidly speeding up deployment

It’s just like startups looking for funding: in a perfect world, entrepreneurs shouldn’t have to search and pine for investors. They should focus on what they do best, which is building the product. So too with developers and hosting.

Facebook announced this week that it has partnered with Heroku, a cloud application acquired by Salesforce last December, to help developers start working on their apps sooner without having to worry about finding a host.

On Facebook’s Developer Blog, developer relations product manager Cat Lee reveals the news:

We continue to make it even easier to get started building apps on Facebook Platform. We know that one of the most difficult things to getting started is setting up a place to host your app. As a result, we are starting to partner with some of the top cloud service providers to make it simpler for you to have your first app up and running in a few clicks -- all from within the Dev App.

Today, we are happy to announce our partnership with Heroku as the first of these providers to be integrated into the Dev App. With Heroku, you can now start building from a sample app in your choice of languages, including PHP, Ruby, Node.js and Python at no cost.

Developers looking to use Heroku can do so all within the app buliding framework provided by Facebook. Create an app, name it, solve a captcha, and developers will find themselves editing basic settings for their app. Clicking “Get Started” under “Cloud Services” will open up a window introducing Heroku as a provider.

With Heroku, as Lee notes above, developers can choose between four different environments: PHP, Node.js, Python and Ruby.

Since Lee says that Heroku is only the first of providers that will be offered by Facebook to developers, we can probably venture a guess at which other providers could be offered in the future. As far as big names go, there’s Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure. Given Facebook's close relationship with Microsoft, Azure might be the first to be released.

There’s also Force.com (another cloud platform from Salesforce), Engine Yard (specifically for Ruby and PHP) and RightScale.

While a seemingly minor update as far as consumers are concerned, Facebook’s partnership with Heroku is a big one as the social network speeds toward its f8 developer conference.