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Facebook and Heroku Announce Partnership

Posted by Jean-Jacques Dubray on Sep 15, 2011

Sections: Architecture & Design,; Development
Topics: Ruby ,; Dynamic Languages ,; Languages ,; PHP ,; Node.js ,; Programming

Facebook and Heroku announced today a partnership to make it simpler to build Facebook Applications. Heroku is the first platform partner to be integrated with Facebook Dev App. InfoQ spoke with Adam Wiggins co-founder of Heroku.

Facebook developers can now create their own app and select Heroku as their deployment platform directly from their Facebook Developer Account. Facebook can even find your Heroku account if you use the same email to register both. Developers can select one of the four languages Heroku supports in production: PHP, Ruby, or Python.

An application template is deployed automatically which contains:

The app contains examples of the following features:

authentication

displaying friends, photos, likes/interests, and friends who also use this app using the Graph API

post to wall using the Feed Dialog

send to friends using the Send Dialog

Once you start editing the code, you can begin to customize your app to do more things. Visit the doc links on the app to learn more.

Three types of Facebook applications are supported: Web site, Canvas and Page Tab.

Adam explained that Heroku has become a polyglot platform. Their goal is to create a Cloud OS, pretty much like standard operating systems in which you install an application and simply start running it. The OS takes care a lot of things from location, to priorities, to memory management, connectivity...

He also noted that node.js and play! are rapidly gaining in popularity on Heroku. He commented "the organic growth is phenomenal". He also added, in his opinion, Play! is giving a new life to Java on the server.

Heroku is also increasingly acting as a back-end for mobile applications with Parse, StackMob and Rhomobile for instance. He mentioned that a lot more was coming in that area as Heroku was getting ready to take it to the next level.