While the world has its attention turned to the revamped search capability Facebook Inc. is rolling out for end-users, Mark Zuckerberg is marking an equally significant milestone in his plans to capture the developer community. The social networking giant has added the option to run its popular Parse mobile framework on the even more widely used Heroku application cloud.

The integration is an expansion upon the server connectivity feature that Facebook introduced earlier this year to let mobile services offload certain resource-intensive code from users’ devices to custom backend environments. Instead of having to manually hook up their applications to Heroku, a developer can now simply link their accounts to Parse through its cloud-based management console.

The reason why Facebook chose the Salesforce.com Inc.-owned platform as the first such third party service to be natively supported in its framework is twofold. First, Heroku one of the biggest names in managed application hosting, and second, one of the main factors behind that continued popularity is its robust support for Node.js.

The open-source framework was specifically created to handle the kind of real-time payloads that mobile applications typically relegate to an external server, like notifications and ad hoc data analyses, which can add up to a lot of work across an entire install base. Better yet, it’s based on JavaScript, the same language in which developers interact with the Parse programming interface.

The combination of the two makes the addition of Heroku support a major step forward for app makers, who now have much more flexibility in how they design the backend component of their software. Salesforce, for its part, stands to gain a considerable amount of business from those users that is only set to increase as Facebook continues to drive the adoption of its framework.

But the cloud giant may not be the only beneficiary of that effort. The social networking giant’s focus on providing developers with freedom of choice will likely result in the addition of similar integrations for rivaling application platforms later down the line, among other third party services and technologies.

Image via Geralt