Building a Node.js App in Heroku

Heroku was a big theme at Dreamforce ’14 this year, releasing a bunch of new, amazing features. As many of you know, Heroku was acquired by Salesforce back in early 2011. Heroku is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), providing support for several programming languages including Ruby, Java, PHP, Node.js, and more. To be brief, Heroku provides a ton of value for traditional app development by making the management and deployment of these applications as simple as currently possible. It removes the need of having a person available for managing these servers as Heroku takes care of all of that for you. On top of that, they provide easy to install and use add-ons that can provide a bunch of different uses. Heroku allows you to focus on the business, rather than the maintenance of your applications. Therefore, you can make sure your app is becoming profitable by using the right app monetization platform, instead of worrying about the technical details.

So, how does Heroku play with Salesforce and where can you find value? This is a question I have heard asked several times. In my mind, a great use case for Heroku is customer facing sites. You need the best uptime possible and Heroku provides that with 99.99% uptime. You will also need the ability to very quickly scale your application if you get slammed with new users. Heroku provides scaling as well. You can do all of this while accessing any of Salesforce’s data through their multitude of APIs. Finally, with tools being built like Heroku Connect you can easily access synchronized data with Salesforce. All of this is built in the Salesforce cloud, so you know it is safe and secure. There are a multitude of other use cases as well, but in my mind this is the most prevalent.

Node + Heroku by Bob Roberts

Originally, when I started working on this article, I was going to walk through setting up Node.js and Heroku. However, Bob Roberts (@TenOperations) did a much better job than I could with his talk at my local Salesforce DUG in the Lehigh Valley. Please enjoy!

Important side note: Going forward, we will be live streaming and recording all of the LVSFDCDUG meetups. Please subscribe to the LVSFDCDUG Youtube channel for more videos like this in the near future. Our next meetup will be on Dec 11th at 6pm EST on Continuous Deployment by Ronald Heft (@ronaldheft), CTO of the Social Station.

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