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Facebook is closing Parse

blog.parse.com

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Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#511

Post by stevewilhelm »

intrasight wrote: post #393
nodamage wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon has fully embraced BaaS. And I don't know of any AWS services they've added and then removed. I think Amazon will be the winner here. MSFT is also starting to embrace BaaS. Of course they have a less stellar history of support.

> Of course they [MSFT] have a less stellar history of support.

Microsoft supported products: Azure - six years, .Net & Active Directory - thirteen years, SQL Server - seventeen years, Visual Studio - nineteen years, and Excel - twenty nine years.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#512

Post by lacker »

jonsterling wrote: post #483
akarve wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

painful. though more an indictment of parse than BaaS. the firebases of the world seem to work better. 20/20 hindsight, when should you have gotten off of parse and why didn't it happen?

I don't think I'm allowed go go into details based on a contract that I signed, so I will just say "we should have got off it earlier".

Hey I'm not sure what contract you're referring to, but from a Parse point of view I think you should feel free to go into details about what didn't scale for you about Parse. There is definitely a tradeoff between "ease of use" and "ease of scaling" in many places and using a "backend as a service" won't be the right thing for everyone. I would rather that people be honest and open about what works well and what doesn't.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#513

Post by eru »

irox859 wrote: post #477
eru wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, open sourcing Reader wouldn't have done much: the code's all tied heavily into Google internal infrastructure. (Full disclosure: my team pulled the plug on Reader.)

Oh you're the villain! But yes I can see that as joining a Blogger page in the Members widget automatically subscribed you in Reader.

Alas, I joined after the damage was done.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#514

Post by inlined »

abiox wrote: post #317
josh2600 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you write your compiler from scratch every time you push an update to your web server? Edit: it is turtles all the way down (and the only way it's not impossible is by virtue of standing on the shoulders of giants).

the parse server is just a couple K sloc, and not (from a cursory browse) exactly revolutionary. writing such a backend (which one would probably leverage over several projects) is qualitatively different than "writing your own compiler from scratch every time".

Read the post carefully. "Parse Server" isn't the actual Parse server. It's a reference implementation of many features.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#515

Post by obelisk_ »

gfosco wrote: 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.

I tried to use node on a $5 DigitalOcean dropplet a couple of times but whenever I tried to run npm to install something, it would run out of memory and be killed. Frustrated with this experience, I have stayed away from Node.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#516

Post by illuzyonist »

We believe that not relying on another hosted BaaS solution is the best strategy. Just because of this we have created an API generation tool called API Plug that can benefit mobile and backend developers. You can export MongoDB from Parse right now. After that you can generate & download your own REST API source code in any language you need in minutes from https://apiplug.com Then you could deploy on your own server and have the full control of your backend.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#517

Post by geoka9 »

rackforms wrote: post #488
geoka9 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask what that solution was? :)

Absolutely! Please do keep in mind no system is perfect, 100% reliability is a dream we all strive to attain, and even with Parse, I've read several reports on this very thread of instances of less than perfect reliability, iffy technical support, and so on. Anecdotal sure, but still. That said: the app sends basic notifications when in-app, user-initiated events of interest occur. The server code is PHP, based off o…

Thanks! I'm going to need push notifications for an Android app and was thinking about using Parse. This news came as a little shock, but perfect timing!

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#518

Post by alyssoncm »

gfosco wrote: 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.

I'm a web and mobile developer. 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 http://parse.back4apps.com and Im happy with the results. I recommend it as a migration option. At any moment you can have your code totally portable.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#519

Post by jonsterling »

lacker wrote: post #512
jonsterling wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'm allowed go go into details based on a contract that I signed, so I will just say "we should have got off it earlier".

Hey I'm not sure what contract you're referring to, but from a Parse point of view I think you should feel free to go into details about what didn't scale for you about Parse. There is definitely a tradeoff between "ease of use" and "ease of scaling" in many places and using a "backend as a service" won't be the right thing for everyone. I would rather that people be honest and open about what works well and what doe…

Hey there—I've done my best to be as honest and up-front about my experience with Parse. (I apologize if it has seemed overly harsh; but it ate its way into many different parts of my life and really made my year difficult.)

But I can't really go into much detail about what we did at our company and why we did it, because when I left, I took a severance on certain terms. And in any case, it's not really appropriate to drudge up old arguments, and I have no interest in making comments that might make it more difficult for the people I worked with to do what they want to do now.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#520

Post by pferde »

Startups411 wrote: post #501
pferde wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your viewpoint: One of the beautiful things about having your own back-end is not having to worry whether or not some 3rd party team is not neglecting security of the back-end because you know you are on top of it.

You sound like somebody who feels comfortable handling security, but for boostrapped and/or a self-funded or even small funded startups, that's extra money that goes to plug a major whole that didn't exist with Parse because they made user authentication, permissions, and security simple. I'm no security expert. So now instead of concentrating on growing the user base, gaining traction and making the best experience…

Of course. Both approaches have their pros and cons.
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