In November 2010, Heroku was a respectable PaaS startup with an impressive 100,000 apps — all written in Ruby. Eighteen months later, the cloud development service is now part of Salesforce.com, and it boasts 1.5 million apps, many written in other languages. In fact, according to Heroku’s Byron Sebastian “at least 50 percent of the apps are in languages that are not Ruby,” with Java, Python and Node.js being particularly popular.
Sebastian says the takeover by Salesforce.com helped the PaaS attract more enterprise development customers. “Twelve to eighteen months ago, all our traction was with individual developers,” he said. Today, Heroku attracts many more enterprise developers who trust the Salesforce.com brand name or who also use the company’s other cloud development platform, Force.com.
