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Facebook is closing Parse

blog.parse.com

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Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#251

Post by AlwaysBCoding »

jonsterling wrote: post #216
jshen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This announcement just underscores the importance of having full control over your backend" I disagree. If using something like this let's you get to market much faster, much cheaper, and find market fit faster/cheaper, then it's worth it. Depending on the need it can take millions of dollars and year(s) of work to then begin working on the actual business objectives.

We used Parse, and (contrary to your suggestion) it helped us get to market much slower and much more expensively . We experienced a hilarious amount of downtime, and hundreds of engineering hours that could have been spent developing features for our users or improving our services were spent working around fatal bugs in Parse, which were usually not manifesting on all instances, which made it very difficult for the…

It's a good thing they had great documentation... oh wait.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#252

Post by giovannibajo1 »

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 a competitor of Facebook. It's a way to discuss with people you know in real-life, share pictures, discuss, communicate.

Many engineers see a "chat app" and a "social network" and they don't see how they can be competitors, but they really are: they compete on being the transport of communication with your friends.

Long-running WhatsApp groups with your family or a specific group of friends is completing exactly what Facebook doesn't successfully provide and what Google+ tried to: a way for a more private discussion within different social circles. And on top of that, there are many people who resist Facebook for "privacy" and happily use WhatsApp (which is very very ironic, if you think of it).

The acquisition of WhatsApp (and Instagram) has been one of the smartest moves from the Facebook management. And not only that, they even handled it correctly afterwards, by not merging one into the other, resisting the usual technical urge for refactoring, unification, removal of duplicates.

Now they basically own all the most successful communication platforms. They own the primary way most people use to communicate with the world.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#253

Post by xyzzy4 »

smt88 wrote: post #12

Does anyone know why this is happening? It was kinda buggy because of its Mongo foundation, but the concept itself was pretty great.

Maybe Zuckerberg isn't passionate enough about it? Like buying a stock and then 2 years later you don't want it anymore, so you get rid of it.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#254

Post by rackforms »

nodamage wrote: post #142

This announcement just underscores the importance of having full control over your backend. Yes, it's more work, but if you're writing apps that seriously depend on backend services, it's simply too much risk to depend on anyone else. Fortunately in this case Facebook offered generous lead time to migrate off Parse.com, but they were not obligated to do so, and other providers might not be so generous in the future.…

100% agree. Building my first notification-based app right now and Parse seemed like the obvious and best choice. Thing is, after a bit of thinking something felt...off. Not with the service, but off with the idea of attaching this small little project to something so...out of my control.

I dug around the net and found a working solution I could install on my own server, and now that's exactly what I've got: The experience of doing this on my own, the flexibility to grow as needed, and the code to implement again and again without needing anyone or anything else.

Building apps these days is a massive gamble for small guys like me. We often spend dozens of hours with little to no possibility of return.

Any action I can take that reduces stress points and increase my knowledge base, (and this would have been a massive stress point) I'll take.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#255

Post by Everhusk »

Dang. I literally just finished building my first app with React Native/Parse two days ago. Was really amazed by how easy the stack was to get production ready, but now? Heigh ho, heigh ho, its off to work I go... :(

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#257

Post by jonathanpeterwu »

bsaul wrote: post #198

A few thought : 1/ parse wasn't a core service for facebook, nor a relevant source of a revenu AND their API wasn't standard. Those points combined made it very risky for people to use it. 2/ since they open sourced their API now, and the service was a paid service, there's a very high probability that someone will very soon create a 100% compatible PAAS. 3/ firebase will be next to shutdown. Not because they suck, b…

Would love to come back to these predictions in 1-3 year timeframe and see which ones pan out

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#258

Post by ViccAlexander »

gfosco wrote: post #185
intellegacy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how long does the full migration and setting the digitical ocean box take to do? debating whether i should do that, or just start over with firebase

Migration is based on data size, but setting up the API server on a new VPS is quick... I'd say less than one hour from a fresh image on Digital Ocean. I'll try to publish a guide for that part.

This would be super awesome!

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#259

Post by derefr »

jonsterling wrote: post #216
jshen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This announcement just underscores the importance of having full control over your backend" I disagree. If using something like this let's you get to market much faster, much cheaper, and find market fit faster/cheaper, then it's worth it. Depending on the need it can take millions of dollars and year(s) of work to then begin working on the actual business objectives.

We used Parse, and (contrary to your suggestion) it helped us get to market much slower and much more expensively . We experienced a hilarious amount of downtime, and hundreds of engineering hours that could have been spent developing features for our users or improving our services were spent working around fatal bugs in Parse, which were usually not manifesting on all instances, which made it very difficult for the…

Interesting. Sounds like Parse wasn't nearly as mature as they made themselves out to be. I'd have expected at least PaaS levels of stability—by, at the very least, pinning each client to a particular API version with guaranteed semantics until they choose to shift to making requests on higher-versioned equivalents of each API resource.

A thought: if "Parse" had originally just been this open source Parse Server offering, and you had taken that and plopped it on e.g. Heroku, would that have been a better deal for you? Seems like "apply FOSS to PaaS to get BaaS" wouldn't have been that much more hassle, operations-wise; and you would have been able to upgrade the backend only when you liked, rather than having it mutated out from under you.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#260

Post by mgrpowers »

mayop100 wrote: post #201
DocSavage wrote: post #51

And just when I was about to choose between Parse and Google's Firebase. Makes me wonder if Firebase will follow the same path through acquisition, seeming stability, followed by closing? As far as similar open-source systems, it seems like Mozilla's Kinto compares favorably to Parse after it's code is released: http://kinto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/overview.html There's a nice table there comparing the different se…

[Firebase founder here] We're not going anywhere. We have strong backing here at Google and are continuing to make big investments in our platform. You'll see big things from us soon. What makes us different? Firebase is very complementary to Google's other product offerings. Cloud for one, as well as Angular, Polymer, GCM, etc.

I hope you're right. I've really enjoyed using your service and plan on spinning up a new env very soon. Thanks for such a great product!
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