Facebook is closing Parse • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#121

Post by sotojuan » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:53 PM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #63

grandalf wrote: post #39

Wow. The 30 minutes you saved by using parse turns into a major headache. This makes me hesitant to use react and react-native.

I'd be hesitant to use anything released by a large company that they don't use themselves for their flagship product(s). Angular 1 comes to mind. I believe Facebook does use React for facebook.com, but not React Native for anything in production yet.

Facebook uses RN for new apps—they're not going to rewrite their older apps because that takes too long and they work fine.

They're also putting a lot of resources on it and hiring some smart people (Dan Abramov).

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#122

Post by Raed667 » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:54 PM UTC

I used Parse for a dozen projects, but none in production, and all were free. To be honest, I loved how Parse allowed me to focus on the App/product without having to worry about APIs and backend.

However whenever I'm serious about an App I end-up investing in some PHP or Node .. This is probably true for a lot of people and this is why it is probably shutting down.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#123

Post by zenojevski » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:54 PM UTC

rokhayakebe wrote: post #82

zenojevski wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…except that this just has just become an open-source API that is self-hosted?

...except being able to integrate with an API does not mean you have the ability to self host, run, and maintain the product.

If you can't self-host because you don't have the ability to, but can't use cloud services either because they could shut down, what alternatives do remain?

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#124

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

rms_returns wrote: post #65

hkmurakami wrote: post #49

>We’re proud that we’ve been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps, but we need to focus our resources elsewhere. I read this as "our Facebook overlords have decided that our revenue/head can be dramatically increased if redeployed on a different part of the overall company, so they have decided to shut Parse down and move us elsewhere." Which is a perfectly fair business decision but this is really sad…

If resource is the question, then I wonder how come they are sustaining WhatsApp? Its a zero-profit activity, the users chat amongst themselves, what does FB gain from that? I guess the parse resource traffic would be little compared to terabytes flowing through the WhatsApp every day.

Whatsapp is hosted on its own custom infrastructure. Parse is hosted on Amazon EC2. Facebook is probably sick of paying Amazon money.

I always thought the plan was to move Parse infrastructure onto Facebook servers...

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#125

Post by purans » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

Looks like time to revive my PubKit - https://github.com/narup/PubKit

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#126

Post by Thaxll » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:56 PM UTC

zenojevski wrote: post #25

ape4 wrote: post #3

Maybe its not such a good idea after all to code your app to a proprietary API in the cloud.

…except that this just has just become an open-source API that is self-hosted?

The point was to not host yourself the backend app. So yes it's nice to get a "replacement" but still...

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#127

Post by gdeglin » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

simscitizen wrote: post #115

gdeglin wrote: post #48

One group of developers this is going to affect most are those who used Parse's GCM Server Key for push notifications. Since Parse is probably not going to reveal this key, Android developers using Parse for push will not be able to use their existing GCM push tokens with other services.

The easiest way to deal with this is to add your sender ID to the app manifest, so Parse registers with both its sender ID and yours: https://parse.com/docs/android/guide#push-notifications-sett... This requires a new release of your app, but that is a necessity in any case.

You're right, it seems like this should work.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#128

Post by pbreit » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

jewel wrote: post #16

I am happy to see that they're not using any of the insulting language that would land them on http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ . FYI, here's the announcement of the acquisition from April 25, 2013: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/the-future-of-parse/ Relevant bits: Q: Will my Parse app be affected in any way? No. Q: Will Parse apps have to use Facebook functionality? No. Q: Will Parse honor my contract? Y…

So that will have been nearly 4 years ago.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#129

Post by muzani » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

Well, this sucks.

My company is about to get acquired for our technology. A huge part of the tech relies on Parse. I mean they were charging for it! Who would think that they will shutting down?

I guess we'll have to rebuild that part from scratch starting right now.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#130

Post by ineedtosleep » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #23

While I'm sure this sucks for a lot of people, I'll be honest the shutdown seems pretty fair. One year notice, detailed migration path with accompanying migration tools, and an open source release of the product itself. I didn't use parse, but this seems like a reasonable way to do it.

Oh definitely. This is a fine example of how to do a service shutdown. Sadly, I await the comments from unprepared customers next year.

If you make apps and use any sort of {P,B,S,I,}aaS, do you yourself a favor and follow/subscribe/whatever to their news/release channels.