With Dreamforce still going on today, Salesforce.com made its biggest announcement yet: it's buying Ruby hosting company Heroku. Many people may be asking "why?" Even others may be wondering, "Who the heck is Heroku?" I'll see what I can do to figure this out.

First of all, VMware and Salesforce.com are all about bringing Java applications as is, to the cloud. Naturally, VMware is heavily focused on Spring applications, because owns SpringSource. Salesforce has been less emphatic about Spring, and has its own slimmed down Java, called Apex.

Java is basically taken care of for the future on Salesforce.com. The company also offers tools for building with .NET, so it's basically covered on all ends when it comes to enterprise software development. But the dynamic languages that are so popular with Web developers are not so easy for Salesforce.com to deal with. That's because the applications have to run inside Salesforce.com's systems, and it's taken them this long just to make that a safe place to run Java. Imagine the headache of securing an execution environment for Ruby, Python and PHP?

Additionally of interest is the fact that many enterprises jumped on the Ruby bandwagon a few years ago, and are now struggling to scale those applications. Ruby applications for businesses essentially had three choices for hosting their applications: Engine Yard, Heroku or Joyent.

That leaves Heroku. And, really, it's a perfect fit. Heroku is a platform. It's a pure Ruby hosting business built on top of a simple-to-use layer of Web-based administration tools. Sound like anyone we know? Naturally, that's the sort of company Salesforce.com would buy. My money is now on VMware to grab Engine Yard, but that's been rumored for a while now, and nothing seems ever to happen on it. And the departure of Yehuda Katz from Engine Yard doesn't help their matters much either.