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Facebook is closing Parse

blog.parse.com

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Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#391

Post by frik »

bsaul wrote: 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…

> google and microsoft moving forward api standardization

Google maybe.

Microsoft never - if it's one thing that is in their DNA than it's they always have undocumented API edge cases, so they can change them right in front of a competitor - they have a very long history doing that. Ask Apple (Word, IE, etc), DOS-competitors (DR-DOS, etc), IBM (OS/2, DOS, OpenOffice, Lotus, etc), "open" Office format (docx, xlsx, pptx = weird XML serialization of their old binary OLE2 based Office format), Win16API, Win32API, NTkernel API, and many more.

You are right with AWS.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#393

Post by intrasight »

nodamage wrote: post #361
bikamonki wrote: post #342

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.

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.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#394

Post by Reedx »

nodamage wrote: post #350
mayop100 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7221823 )

Oh man, good find. I wonder how many examples there are of "We're not going anywhere" followed by closure a couple years later.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#395

Post by intrasight »

aianus wrote: post #245
bsaul wrote: 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…

> gaming console maker (aka Sony) will have the lion's share of the gaming market Given that you need a bleeding-edge $1000 PC to run Oculus at a smooth, nausea-free 70hz, I don't see how Sony is going to get similar performance from a 2-year-old $400 console. Maybe a couple generations down the road, but not in the next few years.

Hardware ray tracing changes everything

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#397

Post by HectorRamos »

aikah wrote: post #337
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.

Kudos for opensourcing ! but : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9693743 I guess the time spent ( a year ? ) on the Go version didn't help feature wise. The product didn't evolve that much in the meantime. I hope you provide a solution for cloud code and webhooks , webhooks at least , since cloud code is just javascript. Please be sure to host the documentation somewhere, like github pages. Good luck for your next…

While this is not specifically GH Pages, the documentation has been hosted on GitHub for quite some time now: https://github.com/ParsePlatform/Docs

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#398

Post by HectorRamos »

sb8244 wrote: post #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.

The "real" Parse service is built to power hundreds of thousands of apps. The OSS Parse Server you run yourself would only need to power a single app. Two very different use cases.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#399

Post by josh2600 »

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".

I understand and appreciate your point.

Mine was that, in the larger context that is computing, you must build on top of something because redoing everything from scratch every time would be ridiculous. You likely trust your CPU instruction set, and your bios and a million other things, but some things you can't trust. Knowing the difference is non-obvious, which is the fact I was lamenting.

Re: Facebook is closing Parse

#400

Post by bayonetz »

nodamage wrote: post #333
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.…

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…

This will definitely make me more wary in the future. I considered both Parse and Firebase for my app's backend and even did some early prototypes using each. Parse ended up being closest to what I needed for the basic app features. I would have used Firebase for real time syncing in a multiplayer version but decided to put multiplayer on hold so I could actually just deploy something.

I kind of got lucky dodging the Parse bullet -- it was only because I quickly saw in my Parse-based prototype I was going to go over the ~1M interactions per month allowed by the free tier. At the time, the tier I could tell I'd be headed for ratcheted up to something like $100/month. I decided I'd rather just build it myself. Obviously, I'm glad I did now. Mostly because I'm on to some other things now and would hate to have to be rebuilding at this point just to keep my humble (yet very much alive and being used) app running.

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