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Facebook is closing Parse

blog.parse.com

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Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#491

Post by csense »

Can anyone explain to me what Parse actually is? Based on a quick read of https://parse.com/apps/quickstart#parse_data/mobile/android/... this is basically a cloud-based key-value store, is that correct? And the value-add is basically that you can subscribe to stuff, and they did all the finicky cross-platform stuff to get it to work in mobile devices?

And this is something that any competent developer could write in-house in a few days, but what they were selling it for is a lot cheaper than a few developer-days?

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#492

Post by alyssoncm »

Parse it is a good solution for a quick app backend setup but I never realized build big things over there. To me the most important to me is no vendor lock-in I see as very important to have full control over what I'm developing. I started to use a great platform www.back4apps.com and Im happy with the results. I recommend it as a migration option

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#493

Post by alyssoncm »

ali_oguzhan wrote: post #291

OK. i ve read all comments here. literally. why no one mentioned baasbox? i am building a mobile app with parse and now considering to move it to the baasbox on my own server. And no one here mentioned them. something wrong with it? http://www.baasbox.com/

Parse it is a good solution for a quick app backend setup but I never realized build big things over there. To me the most important to me is no vendor lock-in I see as very important to have full control over what I'm developing. I started to use a great platform www.back4apps.com and Im happy with the results. I recommend it as a migration option

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#494

Post by DannyBee »

adamors wrote: post #447
DannyBee wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google is a big org. Tomorrow some upper executive you don't even know might decide your product doesn't add value anymore. You know that. " This demonstrates a pretty strong misunderstanding of how google actually works.

Well, there's a reason people have been compiling a graveyard of Google products: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/map_of_the_week/201...

1. This is pretty irrelevant to whether the mechanism is that some magical bigwig exec decides a project "doesn't add value", which is what was suggested might happen.

2. Plenty of companies kill plenty of products. They just don't bother to announce it, they let it die quietly and silently

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#495

Post by lazerwalker »

csense wrote: post #491

Can anyone explain to me what Parse actually is? Based on a quick read of https://parse.com/apps/quickstart#parse_data/mobile/android/... this is basically a cloud-based key-value store, is that correct? And the value-add is basically that you can subscribe to stuff, and they did all the finicky cross-platform stuff to get it to work in mobile devices? And this is something that any competent developer could write in…

That's correct, give or take a few other features.

The selling point of Parse, at least to me, wasn't "this is complex or particularly high-quality engineering". It's "you want to bang out an MVP in a day. Awesome, we took care of giving you a server to shove shit on."

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#496

Post by Salgat »

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.…

All this underscores is the important of not tightly coupling your codebase to a particular provider.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#497

Post by akshaybajaj »

mmastrac wrote: post #73

Ugh. This is why you don't build on proprietary stacks like this. I've detailed tonnes of complaints I've had about the platform itself being awkward and buggy in previous HN comments, but this is obviously the #1 reason not to. If Facebook can shut down a service this big, Google or Amazon can too. Moving a VM is (reasonably) easy, but porting an app from proprietary backend X to another is hard.

I disagree that Amazon can shut down AWS at this point, half of the company internally runs on it.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#500

Post by nodamage »

Salgat wrote: post #496
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.…

All this underscores is the important of not tightly coupling your codebase to a particular provider.

It doesn't matter how tightly coupled your codebase is. If you have a client app that talks directly to Parse.com, it will stop working a year from now, and you will have orphaned users. Even if you release a new build that points to a new backend, not everyone regularly upgrades, not everyone can upgrade.
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