Heroku is claiming the fastest and easiest way to get a Facebook app up and running in the cloud. Yesterday the company announced a new feature for quickly creating a new app with Facebook Cloud Services integration.
Basically, all a developer has to do to spin up the app using Heroku’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is to select Heroku from the Cloud Services section. It’s not hard to pick Heroku out of the lineup – it’s the only provider offered on Facebook so far.
Heroku provides a template for whichever language developers choose (Node.js, PHP, Python or Ruby). The template app will have basic functions for accessing the Facebook API to get lists of users’ friends, photos, interests and other data. The advantage to using Heroku, of course, is that it removes a lot of the complexity of managing servers to run apps. Developers will, of course, want to check out Heroku pricing to see what it might cost as the app scales up.
Facebook/Heroku integration from heroku on Vimeo.
Note that this is not the first venture into Facebook application land for Heroku. The company has offered a Facebook App Package since November 2010. The Newness here is the simplification of creating the apps. Companies like Cardinal Blue and Warner Brothers have already been using Heroku to power their Facebook apps for some time.
Being the first cloud platform officially tapped by Facebook gives Heroku a big leg up. If you’re developing Facebook apps, are you likely to check out Heroku? Is there another PaaS provider you’d like to see added to Facebook’s options?
