The Node.js community found a major new backer in IBM Corp. this week following its purchase of StrongLoop Inc., one of the leading commercializes of the web development framework. No terms were disclosed for the deal, but the startup did shed some light on where its products will go from here in a blog post published on occasion of the news.

Chief executive Juan Carlos Soto wrote in the entry that its two primary commercial offerings, a platform for running Node.js applications and a complementary service that helps with making the data and capabilities of those applications accessible to the outside world, will be integrated into IBM’s middleware portfolio. That includes first and foremost Bluemix.

The company has been aggressively expanding the platform-as-a-service suite in recent months, having previously added a stream processing engine to help developers process real-time data and, shortly before that, a complementary in-memory store. Not having to shuffle bits back and forth from disk makes it much easier to keep up with fast-moving information sources.

The new capabilities gained through the acquisition will enable IBM to give its customers more options in how they take advantage of that data and distribute it among their various applications, web-based as well as mobile. To that end, the company will also incorporate the functionality into its on-premise WebSphere and MobileFirst development solutions.

But StrongLoop’s commercial offerings are only one of the motivations behind the acquisition. No less significant is the startup’s central role in the Node.js community, which it helped unify under the banner of a formal development body on top of making numerous contributions to core components of the framework.

CEO Soto wrote in his post that his team’s involvement with the project will only grow under IBM’s auspices,  underscoring the latter’s focus on fostering its relationship with the open-source ecosystem. The company is not limiting its efforts on that front to Node.js, having recently committed a billion dollars to accelerating the development of Apache Spark and backing and a number of other key technologies including OpenStack.

Image via kuszapro