Facebook has joined hands with many of late and the latest to the integrated list is Heroku. Yesterday, there was a post on the developer’s blog which noted that Facebook developers now would have direct access to Heroku’s cloud Platform-as-a-Service offering for hosting their applications.
The developer community on Facebook is more than just large, which would make Heroku smile as they would have the representation of a potentially significant source of new customers. This integration has been pushed in so that the developers could breathe easy as the hassles would be eliminated by associating with the actual running of an application, once it has been written. Again, this step from Heroku is its first, with the social networking giant, or for that matter with any popular specialized development platforms.
Adam Wiggins, Heroku co-founder said in an interview that writing Facebook applications is actually an easy task to get through with, but Facebook seems to still work to make app building as easy as it gets. Last year, Heroku had its Facebook App Package launched and some did wonder whether, could it be become the official cloud of Facebook.
The process here is quite simple as a new option is incorporated within the Facebook development platform to launch an app on Heroku. One just has to push a button to up an app and starts to run on Heroku. With this, developers would not even have to move out off the Facebook site for running the app. However, after this, developers still do have to log in to Heroku, so that they can set up a password and additionally add services or tools.
Talking about the developers, cloud computing would bring in a number of benefits for them, apart from automating the hosting process. They would even get an assurance that it would handle unexpected traffic spikes too. According to Wiggins, the individual developers would benefit as the integration will let their apps keep up should they suddenly get popular. That would be a big boost for the individual developers who usually do not get popularity for free.
For businesses, the benefits remain the same as for the developers in respect of elasticity. He even noted that this would let them come up with social media inroads, which would be without the extended help of buying and provisioning pools of servers in advance.
Wiggins could not resist saying that mobile apps is an area with particular promise. Some might even recollect that this possibility was highlighted in a recent GigaOM Pro report. In the report, it was added, “specialized offerings, in general, are easier to sell to specific developer bases than are general-purpose offerings.”
However, the usage of Heroku can be started by the Facebook developers as early as by Thursday itself, when the announcement was made about the integration on the Developer’s blog. It was even noted that Heroku personnel would be at the F8 conference, which is to be help next week. His interaction would be to address questions or issues that arise in the meantime.