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Yesterday on Twitter RedMonk analyst Michael Coté asked whether developers actually want to use platform-as-a-services (such as Heroku or Engine Yard) instead of just setting up their own environment on an infrastructure-as-a-service.

I could speculate as to whether the fact that PaaS vendors do in fact have developers paying to use their services is evidence that developers want to use these services, or whether developers habit of setting up their own development environments extends to the cloud. Or I could just ask: do you want to use a PaaS?

There's been a surge in platform-as-a-service providers in the past year, but many of them remain in private beta. Today one more is open to the public: DotCloud.

DotCloud supports PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, Node.JS, MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Solr, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. Like many other PaaSes, it runs on Amazon Web Services.

As platform-as-a-service providers spring up, one area that's been sorely missing is support for functional programming and actor-based programming languages. Clojure, Erlang and Haskell are popular development environments, but these programming paradigms are being left out of the PaaS stack (though yes, you can do functional programming in languages like Python).

Perhaps Cloud Foundry's announcement that it will support Scala and the Lift framework and will be a turning point.

Heroku, the platform-as-a-service provider that Salesforce.com acquired last year, has added Node.js to its existing Ruby offering as part of its new public beta called Celadon Cedar. Other new features include consolidated logging, real-time dynotype monitoring and instant roll-backs.

The first question asked at the post-acquisition press and analyst Q&A was how long it would be until Heroku/Salesforce.com had a Node.js PaaS. We now have our answer.

Platform-as-a-service is one of the toughest types of cloud offerings to understand, but provides some of the most promise - especially for startups. We've looked at the confusion and the promise before. But what about the enterprise? We looked at the Forrester Wave on PaaS recently, and it had more of an enterprise focus. But it also highlighted that the market is still young.

And what about private clouds? We looked at one option for building private a PaaS, Apprenda, recently. Microsoft Azure and Vmware Cloud Foundry will provide similar options. It's a new but growing area.

Do you think PaaS, public or private, has a role to play in the future of the enterprise?

Consolidation has been one of the main trends of 2011. In December of last year, Salesforce.com acquired Ruby PaaS Heroku and, Hat acquired Java PaaS Makara and CloudBees acquired Stax Networks. That lead to much speculation about the future of PaaS consolidation. But the real consolidation action in 2011 has been in telcos acquiring infrastructure-as-a-service companies. Meanwhile companies like VMware have decided to build instead of buy PaaS companies.

Today GigaOm's Derrick Harris broke the news that dotCloud is acquiring DuoStack. It seems that this sort of acquisition is a long time coming.

Following a private beta, the platform-as-a-service (hosted on Amazon Web Services) PHP Fog is now generally available following a private beta. It has a free option offering 100MG of storage, a single domain name and 15GB of bandwidth. Paid plans start at $29 a month.

A few months ago, PHP PaaSes were rare. PHP Fog competed with Orchestra and few others. But in recent weeks VMware and Red Hat have announced new PaaS offerings that include PHP support. Still, given the popularity of PHP-based applications like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, there could be room for several PHP platforms on the market.

Google App Engine now supports Go, the programming language developed by Google for scaling applications and multi-processor systems.

This is one of a number of features in Google App Engine 1.5, announced today at Google I/O.

You'd have to change your list almost weekly if you were to put together one of all the cloud computing platforms.

Andy Hu put together a list that includes more than 50 platforms across multiple programming languages and frameworks. It has been updated multiple times, as has Roch Delsalle's list of PaaS.

For our purposes, we thought it would make sense to start with one category and in weeks following look at platforms across other programming languages and frameworks.

Enterprise social networking company Yammer today announced a new API sandbox for developers working with its API. The sandbox provides developers with a walk through of the oAuth process of getting a testing a token for making HTTP calls.

Yammer has also launched community site for developers based on its own social networking software. Developers need only an e-mail address to join.