Engine Yard is one of the most widely used developer-oriented PaaS solutions out there, but up until now it could only run Rails and PHP. In the next 30 days the platform will be receiving a big boost with the addition of support for Node.js, an up-and-coming server-side language.

Engine Yard already has a very solid base, and this new upgrade will definitely win it a few more paying customers. The company chose Node.js over other frameworks for a reason.

Node is becoming very popular among independent developers, as well organizations. There are a few very convincing reasons behind this trend: the language performs better than some of its bigger peers, its event-driven architecture can power more scalable applications, and the fact it’s based on JavaScript means  frontend developers don’t have that big problem of bridging a knowledge gap.

Engine Yard is coupling its own platform’s advantages, including scalability, with the native pluses of Node to appeal to developers.

“We depend on Engine Yard Cloud to run our clients’ apps because we get the scalability and reliability we need. With support for additional frameworks like Node.js, our engineering team has increased flexibility and choice when building and deploying Web and mobile apps,” said Patrick Ezell, principal of COPIOUS, a premier digital agency. The combination of Node.js and the Engine Yard PaaS enables us to deliver an innovative high performance app that scales seamlessly across desktop, laptop, tablets and mobile.”

The cloud is big in the developer ecosystem, and niche providers have been flashing their R&D muscle a lot lately. appMobi, which offers hosted mobile development tools, recently rolled out a new service called OpenBuild that automates the process of optimizing applications for different platforms.