TechCrunch reports that Salesforce.com is to acquire the popular Heroku Ruby app hosting service for approximately $212 million in cash. We first posted about Heroku back in November 2007 (18 months before it even went commercial) and since then they've gone from strength to strength. Congratulations to the team!

Despite being under embargo with Salesforce on the recent Database.com story and being alerted to almost every other Heroku story in the last few years, TechCrunch obviously got an exclusive so read that for the details, read this Hacker News thread for some smart discussion, and read Heroku's own impressions on what the sale means for them and their customers (in short, Heroku will remain quite independent within the Salesforce.com ecosystem and the brand will live on).

Whatever you make of the sale - and reactions on Twitter are mixed - $212 million is a big deal in the Ruby world and it seriously validates the Ruby webapp hosting industry. A few months ago there were rumors of Engine Yard being in acquisition talks too and perhaps a few more companies will go under the hammer soon. (If your flush-with-cash company wants to either acquire or exclusively sponsor Ruby Inside, Rails Inside, RubyFlow and Ruby Weekly, get in touch! ;-))

For fun, here's a collection of Twitter-based impressions from the Ruby community on the sale: