I would like to see a detailed explanation from Facebook on the business front for closing Parse. Developers would now be skeptical about using any Proprietary service for their backend.
Facebook is closing Parse
341–350 of 543 posts
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#342This 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.…
A few more thoughts: 1. This effectively poisons the well for any other BaaS providers out there. If two of the biggest companies in this space (StackMob and Parse) can get acquired and shut down in less than 5 years, what does that say about the future of the smaller companies in this space? As a developer how could you possibly trust any of these companies going forward, based on this track record? 2. Syncing is no…
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 eventually mature. Bugs will be fixed.
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#343I'm building on top of Firebase at the moment, and this is exactly the sort of thing I'm afraid of.
[Firebase founder here] Google is 100% behind us, and we're continuing to make big investments in the platform. If you have concerns, feel free to ask me questions on twitter: twitter.com/startupandrew
And Facebook was 100% behind Parse, just short time ago.
If anything Google is probably THE most aggressive company in discontinuing products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#344This 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.…
A few more thoughts: 1. This effectively poisons the well for any other BaaS providers out there. If two of the biggest companies in this space (StackMob and Parse) can get acquired and shut down in less than 5 years, what does that say about the future of the smaller companies in this space? As a developer how could you possibly trust any of these companies going forward, based on this track record? 2. Syncing is no…
What if you didn't do it via sync?
What if everything was built around streams that multiple people could read and write to and each stream would have a server that would be the authority on which operation done in which order?
I think that's a more flexible system that can include sync, but also other things.
That's what I've spent years building, and I'm hoping to make it also a completely distributed solution that works across domains:
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#345This 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.…
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...
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#346Earlier 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
You can also look at Couchbase Mobile that provides full power of a Couchbase database locally on the device. You can create, update, delete, query, sync and much, much more.
Easy on the spam buddy.
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#347Separately, 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.
This is a really classy way to shutdown your service. Well done.
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#348Earlier 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…
I'm glad I'm not the only one who had parse slow down development. It was very...janky especially the REST API.
I really felt like I was being gaslighted, being surrounded by all these YC alum douchebags who never fail to have some gushing remark about it...
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#349Many thanks for a great product, for giving away the server code and migration tool but...no thanks. The whole point is that many of us don't want to run the back-end. We cannot afford to do so, we are not fully qualified to do so, our clients will not pay us more to do so.
Anyone else selling a similar service? I'm up for grabs!
Re: Facebook is closing Parse
#350And 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.
Ironically enough the founder of Parse said the exact same thing two years ago in the StackMob shutdown thread:
> You could just use Parse. We're not going anywhere.