SAN FRANCISCO, July 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Heroku, the leading open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and a salesforce.com company (NYSE: CRM), has announced that Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the free and open source Ruby programming language, will join Heroku as Chief Architect of Ruby.

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"As a member of our platform development team, Matsumoto-san will continue his work on the Ruby language in close collaboration with the Ruby community, keeping the language open and advancing the technology in exciting new ways.  Matz will further accelerate innovation for Ruby and make it even friendlier for developers to build world-class apps," said Heroku GM and SVP of Platforms for salesforce.com, Byron Sebastian.  

Since its public release in 1995, the Ruby programming language has spawned a large and rapidly growing following and ecosystem of Ruby-based, complementary technologies.  Used by a million developers worldwide, Ruby runs many of the world's most popular brands, from Comcast and Best Buy to AT&T's Yellow pages, Hulu, and Twitter. Ruby has become the leading development language used to write next generation apps that are social, collaborative, and provide real-time information across mobile devices.(1) Today, Heroku powers more than 150,000 apps written by Ruby developers.

"I decided to join Heroku because they are committed to openness and developing Ruby further," said Matsumoto.  "I want to make the Ruby development experience even richer, more natural and more productive than ever for all Ruby developers."

Matsumoto will continue his work as research fellow of the Network Applied Communication Laboratory, an open source systems integrator company in Shimane Prefecture, Japan. He will also retain his position as fellow at Rakuten Institute of Technology, an R&D organization affiliated with Rakuten, Japan's largest e-commerce company.

A self-taught computer programmer, Yukihiro Matsumoto or "Matz," as he is known in the community, graduated with a degree in information science from Tsukuba University, where he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab on programming languages and compilers.

Heroku was founded in 2007 by application developers for application developers, with the goal of making the deployment and management of next-generation cloud apps as easy as their development. The application platform features a workflow and interface designed around how developers work. Because the platform is a service, there are no virtual machines to manage, no software to install, and no hardware to manage.

(1) Gartner. '2012 Programming Language Market Impact Assessments for Systematic IT Projects ,'May 2011, Mark Driver, Jim Duggan and Thomas E. Murphy.

About Heroku

Heroku is the leading open platform as a service (PaaS) focused on ease of use, automation, and reliability. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Heroku is a passionate and active supporter of Ruby technologies and cloud architecture. Heroku was recently named to the "Dow Jones FASTech 50 Start-ups to Watch" list, recognized as a Gartner 'Cool Vendor in Application Platforms as a Service' in April 2010, named to the Always OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies, and recognized as a 'Best Products of 2009' and 'Best Platform of 2010" by ReadWriteWeb. In April 2011, Heroku was named #2 on its annual list of 'Best Places to Work' in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times .For more information, please visit http://heroku.com and http://blog.heroku.com or follow Heroku on Twitter at http://twitter.com/heroku. Heroku is a wholly owned subsidiary of salesforce.com.

Heroku disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Heroku disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.  Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all.  Customers who purchase Heroku applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

SOURCE Heroku