[caption id="attachment_4601" align="aligncenter" width="574"] Heroku Enterprise for Java leverages Atlassian’s Bamboo integration service in order to automate the various stages of the application delivery process.[/caption] Heroku, a Salesforce company and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor, has announced a service for building and running Java applications in the cloud. Heroku claims the service will allow developers to build and deploy those apps “in minutes instead of months” before moving them “to a continuous delivery model,” all without needing to rely on on-premises software or infrastructure. The service supports core Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Java Development Kit (JDK), including JDK 7 and newer JDK 8. Heroku Enterprise for Java also boasts native support for Eclipse, a Java IDE used by many developers, along with direct deployment of Java WAR files (for migrating existing Java applications to the cloud). It leverages Atlassian’s Bamboo integration service in order to automate the various stages of the application delivery process. The service’s other features include a full stack of pre-configured systems for building scalable applications, complete with memcache for session management and horizontal scaling, as well as Postgres for relational data management. On top of that, Heroku Runtime provides separate environments for development and staging, capable of instantaneous provisioning. “Enterprise developers have been looking for a better way to easily create innovative applications without the hassle of building out a back-end infrastructure,” Oren Teich, COO of Heroku, wrote in a Sept. 19 statement. “With Heroku Enterprise for Java, developers get all the benefits of developing in Java along with the ease of using an open, cloud platform in a single click.”

The Rise of PaaS

Salesforce has long harbored designs on the PaaS space, pushing initiatives such as the cloud-based Force.com application-development hub. The Heroku acquisition in late 2010 allowed the company to give hardcore developers the ability to deploy and scale their apps, in addition to managing traffic and other tasks. However, analysts questioned how well Heroku would integrate with Salesforce. “Its fit into the portfolio and strategy isn’t yet clear,” Forrester analyst John Rymer wrote in a May 2011 corporate blog posting. “The PaaS market’s immaturity is also evident in the relatively low scores registed by many of the vendors in our Wave analyses.” In April, former Heroku CEO (and current Salesforce executive vice president) Byron Sebastian told SlashCloud that PaaS was maturing as a developer option. “You don’t have to think about deploying, patching, or versioning the server; there are huge benefits that come with that,” he said. “Platform-as-a-Service is not [about] renting an application server to you by the hour; it’s about not dealing with servers at all.”   Image: Heroku