In what might best described as a "platform deepening" exercise, PaaS vendor dotCloud is now supporting WebSockets, MongoDB 2.0, and vertical scaling as the company continues to align towards the needs of so-called "full stack" developers.

These developments have come about due to the impact of both HTML5 and the rise of the full stack developer; i.e., a programmer (often primarily web focused) capable of taking on the design, markup, and styling as well as behavioral and programming elements of a project. The full stack developer will also typically be conversant with multiple languages and multiple databases.

According to dotCloud, its latest total offering represents the only PaaS to deliver production-grade native support for multiple databases and languages, WebSockets, and both vertical and horizontal scaling in a single platform.

New technology support on the dotCloud platform includes WebSockets support so that all dotCloud applications can now leverage WebSockets for bidirectional communication between the browser and the backend.

There is also support for mongoDB 2.0, considered to be a "major update" for the high-availability database service, with "guaranteed" backwards compatibility. Vertical scaling means that dotCloud becomes the first PaaS to support both horizontal and vertical scaling. To scale their application, developers can choose between increasing concurrency (horizontal), larger memory allocation (vertical), or both.

"We believe there is a fundamental shift happening in the application development space where languages and databases are agnostic and sets services can be leveraged to build products from beginning to end," said Solomon Hykes "This is FullStack development and we are focused on delivering that promise."

Note: As an industry term, we do not appear to have settled on a de facto format for this discipline/skillset; so expect to read FullStack, Full Stack, full stack, and full-stack for the time being — they mean the same thing.