Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) developer Heroku has released a new version of its cloud application platform, which extends its programming support beyond its Ruby-driven foundations.
Now a part of Salesforce.com, Heroku's codenamed "Celadon Cedar" release is in public beta and at this stage supports the Node.js programming framework. Developers are currently able to define processes via new "procfiles" and gain real-time access to log files and process status.
Heroku's lead developer team says that the platform is evolving in parallel with the PaaS landscape and the cloud itself. Essentially, cloud providers are attempting to give users a better feeling of control when using automated and abstracted cloud services.
The company suggests that developers using PaaS-level technologies are demanding more visibility into the state of their applications in order to analyze how they are running — and to provide custom control over the apps themselves.
Crucially, Heroku says that programmers want these new levels of functionality; they want them now; and that they want them available in multiple programming languages for absolute freedom.
"Over the past three years, we've worked with tens of thousands of developers who are building for the cloud. This new version of the Heroku platform is the culmination of what we've learned and is a major step forward in realizing our vision to serve the millions more developers who will soon be moving to cloud app platforms," said Adam Wiggins, cofounder, Heroku. Multi-language features are:
- Automatic language detection upon deploy
- Full Node.js support
- Ruby 1.9.2 support
- Ability to configure language support via Procfile
But Heroku is not the only player in this space. Speaking exclusively to Dr. Dobb's Journal, Roger Nolan, CTO from OnApp, points out that, "Highly integrated development environments like Heroku are great for getting going quickly. For bigger projects that need to optimize performance and scale, you could run into capacity issues or functionality brick walls, so the 'roll your own' approach offers more flexibility."
