Live data from Hacker News

Facebook is closing Parse

blog.parse.com

371–380 of 543 posts

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#371
One thing that I haven't noticed in the comments is that the released server is parse API compatible. It is not the parse server, and so you aren't guaranteed the same things you are guaranteed from the real parse service.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Au contraire: it opens a wider deeper well. Parse customers are now up for grabs. Do you think they will go back to program back-ends and rent a server? I personally won't. So the supermaket chain where you usually shop at closes its stores for whatever reason. Do you go back to farming your backyard or do you find a new store? The BAAS industry is super young, only hipsters are into it. But it makes sense so it will…

Switching supermarkets is much, much, easier than switching backends. I'm sure lot more BaaS companies will pop up to grab former Parse customers. I'm not sure how many of those will still be around in another 5 years. I strongly suspect there's something negative about the economics of BaaS services that's being implied by the fact that two of the most successful providers have shut down after acquisition.

True. I oversimplified. On the other hand: maybe they were acquired to buy the tech but to shutdown the business?

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#373
Very very disappointing. Parse was a great platform and Facebook killed it. I guess it's going to be full stack AWS all the time forever. They shouldn't have bought it if this wasn't going to be a core part of the business going forward. Boo, Facebook!!

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong! Everything we build is on top of layers upon layers and not a single company/IT team has/can fully control all of them! So you suggest: build your own backend API and run it on a VPS/Container/whatever. Do you have full control on the hardware? The virtual machines? The vendor's infrastructure? Let's move a layer up. Do you have full control over the framework you used? The database engine? Does the sum of kno…

Your reductio ad absurdum is not particularly convincing. I draw the line at exactly the BaaS layer specifically because of the high risk of these providers pulling the rug out from under you. If you disagree, fair enough, but I feel pretty bad right now for the poor developer who decided to adopt StackMob, then migrated over to Parse when StackMob shut down, and now has to migrate once again. Fool me once...

You'll move that line eventually. Datacenters were a hard problem to solve a decade ago. Now its (almost) trivial. Virtual clouds were a buzzword less than two years ago. Now they are huge and successful businesses. Same path for BAAS.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#375
post #2

Separately, we developed an open-source Parse-compatible API server for Node/Express. https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server This, along with the database migration tools released earlier, allow developers a full migration path to move from Parse hosted data + API to their own infrastructure. Over the weekend, I set up a website & app on a $5 DigitalOcean box running Parse and Mongo locally.

What about push notifications and Parse Config? Social apps that triggered push notifications now loose that functionality when moving to Parse Server, right?

Also what about security? One of the beautiful things about Parse was not having to worry about servers and the security of back-end because you knew Parse was on top of it.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ran into the exact same issue when using Parse. I was working on an app that operated primarily through push notifications. The push notification downtime was horrible -- I remember having to get on calls with clients apologizing profusely for the downtime. We were also paying Parse an absurd amount of money for extra reliability, which didn't seem to help much. I never heard people talking about the difficulty of mo…

Exactly, exactly, exactly!

> We were also paying Parse an absurd amount of money for extra reliability, which didn't seem to help much.

We were also hooked into the same scam!

> For nearly any issue, a half-assed solution---often not usable in production---by one of their staff was buried deep into their forums. Super painful.

Haha, well put. They always directed people to their pathetic "support forum", where one of their staff would propose a criminally bad "solution" to a problem, which no self-respecting engineer could even sanction putting into production.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#377
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…

Consider moving to Couchbase Mobile ( http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile ). Why? - Its an open source solution that allows you to build mobile applications that work online and offline. - With Couchbase Lite, you have the full power of a Couchbase database locally on the device. You can create, update, delete, query, sync and much, much more. - Couchbase Sync Gateway gives you everything you need to securely sync…

My goodness. How many of these sales pitches for Couchbase do you intend to insert into this discussion?! One time, that's cool. But you're way, way, way over quota. Give it a flipping rest.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#379

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.…

Not to be a dick, but some companies seem to care more than others about the developers that rely on their frameworks. Google doesnt seem to care much. Facebook seems to care more. But Microsoft seems to care most. They have not abandoned legacy mfc, visual basic, and win 32 developers even though they probably should have. Granted those are not services but they require maintenance resources nontheless.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reductio ad absurdum is not particularly convincing. I draw the line at exactly the BaaS layer specifically because of the high risk of these providers pulling the rug out from under you. If you disagree, fair enough, but I feel pretty bad right now for the poor developer who decided to adopt StackMob, then migrated over to Parse when StackMob shut down, and now has to migrate once again. Fool me once...

You'll move that line eventually. Datacenters were a hard problem to solve a decade ago. Now its (almost) trivial. Virtual clouds were a buzzword less than two years ago. Now they are huge and successful businesses. Same path for BAAS.

That's possible. But the current model of "give us money, use our code, and we'll host your data" is pretty clearly broken.
Post reply on HN