Salesforce has launched Heroku Elements, a marketplace of pre-integrated app components, services and tools that empower developers to build engaging customer-facing applications.
Heroku Elements enables developers to quickly search a broad ecosystem of trusted tools, components and services and discover the elements needed to develop better apps faster. Heroku Elements also provides developers with user experience, support, productivity, and reliability of Heroku's enterprise platform to deliver success at any scale.
Today, developers are not just writing custom code to create apps. They are composing apps out of pre-built elements, such as messaging services, payment systems, app monitors and data stores. However, researching and finding the specific elements developers need to build apps is a burdensome task. Heroku Elements solves this problem with a new marketplace that enables developers to find, evaluate, and quickly utilize modern services, components and tools.
Heroku Elements includes three new categories of app components, some built by Heroku, but the vast majority of which are built and maintained by Heroku's robust ecosystem of more than 1,500 partners and open source developers. Each Element on the marketplace can easily be found by use case or function and help developers decide which element is right for their needs. It also includes key information around number of installs, recent updates, region data and more.
App components include:
- Add-ons are tools and services pre-integrated into Heroku that are tailored for developing, extending, and operating apps. In the Heroku Elements marketplace, developers can search and preview add-on functionality to select which fits best with their app's specific needs.
- Heroku Buttons are third-party components, libraries, and pattern apps that allow users to deploy with a single click. The Heroku Elements marketplace lets developers find which Heroku Buttons are new and trending, giving users the perfect recipe to start building apps quickly.
- Buildpacks allow users to easily customize the build process in their preferred framework, language, and community. Now, users can search the Heroku Elements marketplace to discover new Buildpacks from Heroku or choose from the hundreds built and maintained by its community.
"There is a quiet revolution underway in software development: The nature of the work is shifting from developing and deploying large complex applications to connecting new and existing services in unique and value-added ways," wrote Forrester Research analysts Michael Facemire and Kurt Bittner. "New solutions to help developers find the right services they need and keep track of what they used to manage dependencies are needed to manage the potential complexity developers will unwittingly create."