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Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative

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Re: Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative

#61
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite active, though most development is going into the 2.0 release (which adds things like clustering). Here's the alpha if you're interested. https://couchdb-ci.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/release-candid...

Cool, is there an ETA on 2.0? I remember not being able to find much of a roadmap when I was doing this evaluation, but that's probably just my fault.

Don't think there's an ETA, but there's a list of issues which are blocking the release. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-2932?jql=proje...

FWIW, it shouldn't be difficult to upgrade from 1.x to 2.0 as you'll be able to replicate from a single-node database to a clustered database.

Re: Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative

#63
Why Python rather than something like Rust instead?

The phrase "lightweight" is thrown around, but the [requirements.txt](https://github.com/Kinto/kinto/blob/master/requirements.txt) is anything but lightweight and that's before you consider carrying around python itself.

It seems like compiled version would be more efficient and much smaller.

EDIT:

Their FAQ seems to make this question even more interesting

> Why did you chose to use Python rather than X?

> We love Python because it’s a concise & expressive language with powerful data structures & easy to learn, so it was an obvious choice for the development team.

> In addition, the Operations team at Mozilla is comfortable with deploying and managing Python applications in production.

> However, Python is just an implementation detail per se. Kinto is defined by an HTTP protocol that could be implemented in any language.

If your end-user is hitting a HTTP API, then Python being "easy to learn" is a non-goal. Rust (or even JS + Node) is just as "expressive". This really makes it sound like their team is inexperienced with DB design (not very confidence inspiring). I find it equally mystifying that operations would dictate python rather than whatever language the team thought would be best.

Re: Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative

#65
post #15

At this point, Parse is open source, too. Why an open source clone if you can have the original?

An open source project needs active developers and maintainers in order to stay healthy and grow. Parse is now open source in the sense of "here's a bunch of code we're throwing over the wall on our way out". Presumably (after the 1-year deadline) it's not going to be maintained or further developed by the original Parse team, who are now working for Facebook and will likely be reassigned to other roles. Who is going…

Yes open source projects do, and Kinto is currently a well supported project at Mozilla. The folks who made Kinto are awesome, and do awesome things at Mozilla, but my personal experience from working at Mozilla is that Mozilla is an awesome steward of open source projects for users. The devtools team is doing a much better job of becoming stewards of tools for developers, but Mozilla has traditionally been less than ideal steward of projects for use by third parties.

Re: Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative

#66

So my problem with kinto and couchDB/couchbase is that as a newbie indie developer I have no idea how to get started with these. AT least with Parse they had an iOS SDK and tutorials. With kinto or couchdb/couchbase i don't even know where to begin.

[Architect from Couchbase]

We hear you and we're working on that. A good place to start is w/ our mini-hacks. Here is an iOS one that I think could help: https://github.com/couchbaselabs/mini-hacks/tree/master/kitc...

Re: Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative

#67
post #53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PouchDB and CouchDB are great for prototyping of apps, but access restriction in CouchDB is broken by design: it is hard to make it correct, CouchDB is open by default, user can store anything in DB it has access to, including pr0n. If CouchDB will close DB by default AND it will be easy to specify politics by REST path AND it will be easy to restrict document schema by REST path, then I will use it in production.

The access control limitations in Apache CouchDB are a big part of what we addressed in Couchbase Sync Gateway. Info about our Sync Function API http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/1.1.0/ge...

Are there any whitepapers or case studies of large-scale production applications using and maintaining a sync function? After using sync gateway with access control for a while, it became more clear to me that writing my own access control API (via node.js or something like that) on top of MongoDB would give better readability and maintainability over a sync function.

(edit) specify mongodb

Re: Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative

#68
post #25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to host and manage it.

We have a one click deploy to heroku button http://kinto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/get-started.html#depl... It's not entirely satisfying, but that just proves we could integrate with many hosting platforms.

I just created a PR to deploy Kinto on Google App Engine (Managed VMs).

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/python-docs-samples/p...

If there's interest I'll try to flesh it out more.

Re: Kinto by Mozilla – An open-source Parse alternative

#69
post #15

At this point, Parse is open source, too. Why an open source clone if you can have the original?

An open source project needs active developers and maintainers in order to stay healthy and grow. Parse is now open source in the sense of "here's a bunch of code we're throwing over the wall on our way out". Presumably (after the 1-year deadline) it's not going to be maintained or further developed by the original Parse team, who are now working for Facebook and will likely be reassigned to other roles. Who is going…

The value of Parse is entirely in the client SDKs that would take forever to build and not in the server (which is a simple rest API over MongoDB).
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