During this year-long shutdown/migration process, the open-source and community maintained Parse Server is what most people switched to. Parse is yours now. https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server
Something I've been wondering is would you recommend using the open source Parse server for new code or is it more targeted towards projects that were already using the Parse API?
I have created a few apps using Parse.com, one of them successful enough to take the additional time/cost hit to migrate and host myself using the Parse-Server project.
The open source project is great and I appreciate the effort that went into making sure we didn't all get (totally) screwed.
Would I use Parse-Server for a new project? Probably not. The state of the BaaS options out there has changed/improved significantly since Parse.com was a thing.
Yes it's google behind ... but you should rewrite the whole application. That's why I respect Facebook about their decision to opensource the Parse Server. The is the beginning of the Open Backend world. With Parse Open Source everybody will get Personal MBaaS :)
I second the Firebase recommendation. Facebook killed off their BaaS acquisition while Google doubled down on theirs. If you prefer open-source, Horizon (http://horizon.io/) is a great alternative to Firebase but does not have many of the key features like file storage and iOS/Android SDKs.
I completely agree that on its own, the querying functionality can be quite tedious for anything complex. I linked to this solution on the comment above as well: https://github.com/davideast/Querybase
> Querybase is in an experiment and not for production
Also since Firebase doesn't allow more than one filtering field with orderByChild(...) I'm guessing Querybase will do all the work on the client. This is less than ideal since the data has to be downloaded first.
Querybase is also making permutations of all the data you may wish to query. Needlessly taking up space on your server that will have to be retrieved. Wasted bandwidth etc.
I wouldn't call this an "issue" as much as a "limitation". Just as you can develop a data denormalization process for any use case, you can develop one for Firebase.
Here's a practical example of doing joins with Firebase (written by David East who is also the star of that video you linked): https://github.com/davideast/Querybase
As I found out today if you want the analytics data in CSV, or query it to any level that's useful beyond "We have 5 users in Stockholm on KitKat", you'll need the next service tier up, which is $25 per month per project.
But if you want basic analytics, then it's free & easy.
Horizon is a scary recommendation right now given the recent shuttering of RethinkDB (the company). It might still be a great choice, but I would give the community some time to coalesce and see where things end up before recommending it for new projects.
I really like Firebase, but for specialized cases as others mentioned. The realtime updates are solid, and the iOS SDK at least is deep enough to let you dig into edge cases when needed (like, how many clients are listening to this node?). But I use it like an in-memory store to sync live data. Can't imagine having to use it like a full database - I use Parse for storing more permanent data across tables.
I used to work at Kinvey, they've got a pretty good product geared towards integrating with whatever you've got to connect with. They have always been security conscious, even have HIPAA support now IIRC.
Happy to answer any questions, or get some current devs there into the conversation to help out.
I used it for a new project I started 6 months ago. We've since transferred to AWS and a Express/Node.js project. However the Parse Server open source project is very well maintained and supported. I would recommend it for any quick prototype project you need a backend, but don't need it to do anything fancy.
I think it depends on your level of expertise and the requirements of your project. Having Parse Server as something you can set up in a few minutes on a VPS and start building a client-server app is great. The integration via the various SDKs is incredible, and it takes a long time to build something like that out. All the available options have their tradeoffs, but I think having the source and an interested community is a great pro in the Parse column.
It's geared towards legacy. I have used parse in 3 different projects (none of that was my choice, these were existing projects I had to take over) and I would NEVER recommend it for new projects.
The way everyone seems to use it, in my experience, is giving the client credentials to manipulate the full database which is absolutely insane. Obviously this is not good practice but every single parse project I've gotten thrown into already did this and it was a significant amount of work to move it to be more secure and NOT do that. I think the way it's created makes it very, very easy to make bad security choices.
It's also basically a RESTful CRUD. That's mostly it minus some, mostly minor, bells and whistles. You can already do this with about 20 different open source stacks very easily and you're not stuck using this parse technology.
I can't articulate just how much trouble parse has given me. I even took an app and re-wrote its entire backend away from parse significantly faster than doing a handful of updates.
> I think the way it's created makes it very, very easy to make bad security choices.
I can sympathize with this. I work on a dynamic API security scanner, and the vast majority of the Parse APIs I've scanned have either used API keys with full read/write permissions on the DB, or have left the database in development mode, essentially allowing anyone with an API key to modify the schema of the database.
Parse was a very cool product, but most setups I've seen didn't take advantage of the (sometimes hard to find) security features Parse provides.
Later versions don't let you easily give the client full access. You instead have to do it through Cloud Code (another facet of Parse), so the key never leaves the server.
Not to disagree with your overall assessment. I'm generally wary of these swiss-knife frameworks - they're written for a particular use case in mind, and if your project doesn't fit that, you may go through contortions to get things working smoothly.
> Later versions don't let you easily give the client full access. You instead have to do it through Cloud Code (another facet of Parse), so the key never leaves the server.
That's fantastic! I never kept track of which version(s) I worked on but I had transitioned one project from Parse to Parse Server and it was still able to work this way but I'm glad they made progress to try and force better security.
I just noticed the app I used with parse did exactly what you said (gave the client full access to database writes). My app only held "public" data and no passwords, emails, or sensitive data, but I was wondering how you manage to secure the DB writes. Wouldn't you need another server to send the write requests that would validate them before sending them to parse? Or is there another way?
To secure code with parse I believe the most common way is to basically move everything behind cloud code.
So instead of making HTTP calls to directly modify the DB you make HTTP calls to cloud code functions you wrote which then verify who you are and only modify what you should be able to modify.
for mvp I would say yes, parse-server provides security (ACLs/permissions) and performant database query helpers out of the box, its a battle-tested abstraction layer to mongodb, I had to make some workarounds to work for my specific usecase but just like any other framework it has it pros and cons, marketing and getting new users is the bottleneck for me not the database
I second the sentiment that Parse has done a good job of shutting the platform down and giving users warning/notice. I hope the Open Source version takes off (looks like it has, with 12K stars!).
Awesome Fosco! The open source community has already 12k+ stars on Github and is growing fast. Thank you for all the work and collaboration! You rock guys!!!!
Huh. Yeah, I dove around a bit, browsed the wiki, etc, and so far all I've seen is the equivalent of "an open source version of the Parse backend". No description anywhere that I can see about what it does or why you should care (unless you're already on Parse, of course).
IIRC the Parse homepage used to have this, but ever since the shutdown notice (so, for the past year) the homepage has largely been useless.
So many posts on HN are like this, assuming that every obscure webservice is common knowledge. "Jabberwocky has reached version 1.1! Performance increased by 30%, users must migrate from 1.0 by the 12th. Use Jabberwocky in your business now! New users get a free trial!" OK that's nice but what tf is it and why should I care?
Yesterday I built a 100M user social network using Jabberwocky. It took me just 25 minutes, bro, and now I've retired to my own private Caribbean island.
I'd assume the main goal of the open-source Parse Server is to provide some support for previous users of Parse? Who would already know what Parse does.
Attracting new users unfamiliar with the technology seems at best secondary ( and possibly, unwelcome) to the Parse Server community now.
From my understanding, it provided services that you would have to create from scratch in your own infrastructure that would be a significant undertaking. For instance, push notification in iOS is a bit of a nuisance if your app really doesn't rely on a complex server back end, but you would like to still add push notifications. Parse did this portion for you, so you could focus on the product. I could be wrong though, I looked at it a year ago, and my memory isn't what it used to be.
The first iOS app I built used parse for the entire backend. We basically used it as a database in the cloud accessible by multiple clients (it can accommodate fancier uses as well). We didn't really run any custom code on the server side, Parse basically provided access to a shared db across our client instances. It allowed us to build a simple location sharing app in a few hours.
It was basically a CRUD API as a service; simple object storage and retrieval via HTTP, with goodies like validation and nested routes (joins) and such built in.
And if I download the open source code, and run it on my own server, is it a service as a service as whatever-the-opposite-of-a-service is? I'm confused...
You're thinking too small. Support it multi-tenant on a fleet of servers and sell it to customers, now you've got a service-as-a-service-as-a-platform.
I would call Parse a "Backend as a Service"[0], akin to Firebase[1]. "API as a Service" is more like Apiary (bought by Oracle) or Apigee (bought by Google).
This is a major failing of a lot of open-source projects and a lot of real companies as well. Fortunately Wikipedia often provides some background. It's my go-to place whenever I'm confronted with some un-navigable home page filled with hipster jargon about how a company wants to "empower" me with "cloud" "solutions".
Parse.com was a BaaS(backend as a Service) acquired by Facebook in 2013. Using the platform was possible to build and host most of all your app backend(database, legacy code, integrations, Push notifications, send emails, social login, ...) and to integrate with your app front-end using the SDKs or even using a REST API. Parse Server is the open source version of Parse.com launched after the Parse shutdown announcement.
The same with the package.json, it points to /lib/index.js.
However there is no /lib folder, apparently its name is /src. So there is basically no possible way that is even able to run. How is this possible? Either someone linked /src to /lib (doesn't make sense) or they changed the name of the folder and didn't change anything else.
I was never a huge fan of parse, having seen startups fail hard when using it, and I've been pretty vocal about that in the past [1]. It was a great idea in principal, but failed pretty hard when faced with the reality of non-toy development.
I generally hate to see projects fail, but in this case I'm not terribly upset. I think that people were getting sucked into the ease of getting apps up and running quickly, then spending 2-3x the effort getting past that initial stage versus doing it in a more traditional stack.
Perhaps the open-source server might give the community some opportunity to fix the many, many glaring bugs and problems, but I have felt like the specific design of Parse itself was just too flawed to succeed.
Did you vocalize any of these issues anywhere? I have never used Parse but have been looking at the open-source version. What are the many, many glaring bugs and problems you're referring to?
We would all go crazy trying to report all the bugs we found in every piece of software out there these days. When there are too many or something is too difficult to use, you move on. To a large extent, finding bugs is the responsibility of the developers. When users submit bug reports, good ones at least, they should be thanked. My point is, as a developer, you can't blame the users for not reporting bugs.
That wasn't my question, but ok. I was just asking for the list of the "many, many glaring bugs" that OP was talking about. He edited his link, though, so it's already been answered.
What's the shame in being a great prototyping tool? While it's not the right choice for everything in your stack, it's definitely one of the fastest ways to get a service or product off the ground.
My company came out of a similar place with Firebase. The initial version of our product was written 100% against Firebase. This was absolutely a good choice when it was made, but -- surprise! -- two years later, we had to start involving other databases. Was it harder than any other two-years-in scaleup? I didn't find it so. And we still use it where it makes sense.
That's the problem. It wasn't a great prototyping tool. Great prototyping tools are fine. Parse was not a great prototyping tool. In my not-terribly-nuanced-opinion, it was a really nice GUI wrapped around a not-so-great shim on top of MongoDB.
I don't have specific experience with Firebase, but I believe that from what I've heard from others using it, has a much better design that would survive much longer in the face of growth.
You say that you had to involve other databases two years in? The startups I've seen using parse are failing over to alternative technology much, much sooner.
Just read all your objections to Parse.
It seems to me that all of them arise from two core things
- You don't have access to database that actually holds the data
- The database is MongoDB which is quite young compared to MySQL/Postgres and can't do terribly complicated stuff
The above two things as you said made Parse very inflexible once you get beyond prototype phase.
I think i solved all of your objections in my product (http://graphqlapi.com) which puts the database at the center and the schema drives the api.
Internally it uses PostgREST to which i've been a core contributor for more then a year now ... how time flies :)
Thank you for the praise, however i really want to stress that Sub0 (and PostgREST) are not prototyping tools only :)
It's true that you don't build api's with them the way you would with a more traditional stack but you can build real products with this a lot faster.
This style of building APIs clicks faster with people that use (and trust) Postgres
Since it's in private beta which started a few weeks ago there is not specific system in production of Sub0 specifically, but someone (medical research institute with lots of research data) is already building a React frontend over their massive Postgres database using Sub0 and so far it's going well.
The tutorial i provide explains building a complete API for something like Trello
At the core of the system sits PostgREST and you can see a few users here http://postgrest.com/en/v0.4/intro.html#in-production although i suspect a lot more people are using it but don't advertise it. I've also done extensive performance test for speed, those numbers on the home page are real :)
I have seen a fair number of "abrupt" and poorly executed shutdowns on HN over the last few years, and although I don't use Parse, I feel as though the team did a good job sunsetting this over the last year. Thank you for the product, the open sourced version, and for not ditching your community! Best of luck to everyone who worked on the team
On finding an interesting market @ 13:30: Evidently the Parse folks discovered they were dealing with an agency building an application for the Food Network. The agency needed SLAs/enterprise contracts and Parse found a $$ customer base
Yeah, that's pretty impressive. YC should consider making it a requirement of funding that the components go open-source if they shutdown without acquisition, etc. Aside from collective benefit, a future, YC startup might get a head start from their docs or components. They seem to fund multiple startups in the same market segments at times.
And in such a case, an Open Source mandate would directly conflict with the financial interests of the investors (the time required for the effort takes away from the liquidation amount of the remaining assets.
It would only if the software source or patents compromised the value they gained from the business. This would be the case for some startups. It wouldn't be for others where brand, talent, & existing users were what they were after.
It also wouldn't take any significant time given developers could just push the final source and docs into a Github repo with a license. Or just dump it as a zip on the web. That's nothing. Also a good chance that at least one ex-developer would like to do it just so their work wasn't totally wasted.
How many production systems have you come across that could be dumped onto the public without any cleaning? Credentials, build systems, personal information, patent use, are a couple of examples that I've seen in prod code that couldn't or shouldn't be included.
Assuming the cost of open sourcing something is zero, even if it's just a zip dump, is usually not correct.
Fair enough. I forgot about the malpractice of putting credentials and personal information in the code itself. Companies doing that would have a hard time open sourcing the code. Others whose build system doesnt cleanly separate 3rd party or internal stuff might also have trouble. Patents I already handled by saying they simply don't release third party stuff that's proprietary. Patent-encumbered code or tech is one such thing.
They'd have to be left out. The rest could be open-sourced. If 3rd party stuff is hidden behind API, it could even be replaced with open-source stuff. That's not even necessary as my recommendation is to not overly burden the startups with this requirement. They just dump what's theirs somewhere under FOSS license. Others can do the necessary work of dealing with missing, 3rd-party components if they want to reuse the FOSS code.
They did a great job with Parse server, but unfortunately for people who just wants their data they basically have been abandoned.
Exporting data in JSON format is no longer supported. The featured has been left broken without any explanation, and they disabled the ability to contact them in regards to data export.
The Parse folks seem to have handled this reasonably well but this is the perfect illustration of why building your own application around a third party service like this is not a pure win. There is a tradeoff and it can in fact bite you.
It's a shame so many people think of the Data Access Object design pattern as something only Java developers should be using. Using DAOs to provide database-agnostic access to your data takes a few moments more at first, but then when you need to move data from $DB_X to $DB_Y, there's a lot less wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I'm not sure what your point is. Do you mean that if only people used DAOs then Parse shutting down wouldn't be a problem? It only encapsulates the problem. You still need to go through a process to switch from Parse to MariaDB or whatever else you switch to. You just don't have to rewrite your whole application.
I'm in favor of DAOs and use them myself but they don't have anything to do with what I was talking about.
Parse was an amazing discovery when I was just starting out my dev career and I've used it in all of my major projects, but it had some serious shortcomings. I wrote about why I think Parse failed from a developer's perspective.
Why do you think Parse was a failure in the first place? Surely, Parse founders got a nice little cash out of the acquisition and Facebook got developers onboard and Facebook Login integrated onto many apps.
But it is a reasonable enough definition of it that we should be able to apply the principle of charity to calling it a failure, no? It is not something anyone would mistake for "success" on its own terms, even if the people involved did OK for themselves.
It really depends on the goal. It's a success if the goal was to build something to be IPO'd or acquired for benefit of investors and founders. It was a big success in that regard. It's a failure if the goal was mainly to benefit developers. That wasn't the main goal. Incentives like this are why I don't use VC-funded stuff unless I have a fall-back option. Risks also apply to proprietary software in general but many suppliers are more interested than startups are in sucking money out of you for long-term. Market leaders stick around longer.
When a marriage ends in divorce, it is fair to call the marriage a failure even if you get a profitable settlement from the divorce and even if you both go on to better marriages. Same reason.
Why not? I wouldn't choose to develop against SaaS that I knew was going to shut down in 5 years. Parse also said they'd keep running after the buyout.
Speak for yourself, but the longer the tool has been around, the more I trust it. One of the chief selling points of learning something like Vim or Emacs is precisely that it isn't going to disappear next week and become abandonware (TextMate) or just lose interest from people because something else came along (Sublime Text → Atom/VS Code).
Same with a lot of developer tools. (This is sometimes bad. It is still taking a long time for people to migrate to Python 3.x, and the transition from CVS/SVN to Git and other DVCS was pretty slow.)
Depends. I don't know what the acquisition price was but given that they're shutting it down, I'm thinking it was in tens of millions range, which makes it an aquihire. Assuming they raised low to mid tens of funding, The investors probably have a 1x or more a preference on the sale. This means the leftover value is in the low to mid ones of millions. I love that you're getting 0.1% So we're talking like ones of thousands of dollars for an engineer after two years of work at probably less than market rate salary.
Given that your equity package at a large company would be is late and 50 times that per year yeah the engineers didn't come out ahead so it's a fail.
Baseless conjecture shot down immediately by someone intimately involved with the project is truly something beautiful to behold.
Are you at liberty to discuss the actual reasons and shed a bit more light on why things went down the way they did?
Side note, your product was unbelievably popular at my university. Parse made getting a functional DB up and running for courses and side projects completely painless and a no-brainer for tight deadlines and PoCs.
I have to agree with @csmajorfive - This is quite wrong from both a factual numeric point of view as well as guesstimates on what percentage that investors/founders/employees got.
Technically I believe the software was re-implemented as open source; the initial release didn't measure up compared to what Parse offered but the project has grown since then.
Facebook bought it. Parse was highly coupled to AWS at the time. They spent some 3 years trying to get it to run on Facebook's cloud, and apparently failed to do so. Facebook decided to cut their losses, and shut it down.
The export data feature has been broken for months — it’s stuck in the “waiting to begin…” phase. Is there plans to allow people to export their data?
I’d like to get my data out, but both options for exporting data via the dashboard
are broken. They also disabled the ability to contact them in regards to the export data functionality.
uhhh...sorry to say but I don't think you're getting that data out anymore.
>When your app is disabled, you will not be able to access the data browser or export any data, and your applications will no longer be able to access the Parse API.
The apps were not disabled. The export feature hasn't been working because of a bug on their end. It seams like the claim that Parse "firmly believes in data portability" is complete BS.
The data export feature was replaced by the database migration tool we launched on January 28 last year. We highly recommend using the database migration tool as this will ensure that all of your data is copied over and synced to your new database prior to switching traffic over. Tons of apps have migrated in the past year using the db migration tool.
It's terrible that you aren't allowing data to be exported anymore. You shouldn't need to setup a server and go through the migration process just to get your data out.
The prior export feature that allowed data to be exported in JSON format was great, but that was left broken without any explantation.
The way you phrased it almost seem sarcastic in the context of this thread, although i think you are actually recommending them :)
They offer a interesting product but i think at this moment it has the exact same problem that Parse had (my other comment in this thread), you don't have access to the raw data, hope they will do that in the future (provide direct access to the source database), it will certainly be a more interesting/flexible service
Hi ruslan_talpa, I'm one of the founders of Graphcool. Thanks a lot for your feedback. You're totally right: Not having direct access to YOUR data is one of the main concerns about BaaS which we'll address at its core over the coming months.
I'd be very keen on hearing your experience getting started building something on Graphcool!
Thanks a lot for the shoutout, bh13731. The sunset of Parse and the rise of GraphQL was indeed one of the reasons for us to start working on Graphcool. We have a lot of customers who migrated from Parse to our platform which was a good usability benchmark for us.
In general GraphQL provides many advantages over a traditional REST like API provided by most BaaS. It frees you from the need for proprietary SDKs and reduces vendor lock-in.
Read the rest of this thread before you transfer there; you'll find that all the posts are by new users and were flagged. I won't say it's brigading, but use your own judgement to decide whether this comment was legit.
We migrated to Sashido about a month ago. Migration was pretty painless. There was one brief outage lasting a couple of hours but other than that the experience has been positive. Beats having to rewrite the app or deal with running own Parse instance (at this early stage of our startup).
I have been using Sashido for at least 6 months now.
In the beginning I started out trying to host my own Parse servers, since I really liked the concept of Parse as Open Source as well. But running it yourself ruined the whole benefit of Parse.com. As a startup it is not my core business to run a mobile backend a first, but to create an awesome user experience in the mobile app.
Sashido's pricing model is also clearer than Parse.com's, charging per request instead of request/sec. Yu also HAVE to pay at least $4.95 that makes it less likely for them to shutdown due to lack of revenue.
I can really recommend sashabdo! Also if you've not been using Parse.com.
Yes, it was sad news when they announced it. I have migrated to http://www.sashido.io last months and they are fine.
Look it from the brighter perspective it is open source now and this gives much more possibilities :)
The team at Sashido.io was helpful every step of the way. Any bump in the road I had would be answered right away. Even if that bump was just me being paranoid. Go team Sashido.io!
Migrated ~25 apps in the last 2 weeks to Sashido.io and the customer support was incredibly swift! It's like they are constantly online and were prepared for this heavy shift.
Migrated ~25 apps in the last 2 weeks to Sashido.io and the customer support was incredibly swift! It's like they are constantly online and were prepared for this heavy shift.
A key takeaway from this; and one of the main reasons parse failed-- don't name a company or service after an extremely generic programming term.
Parse failed for a lot of reasons but I hated it because the documentation was terrible at the beginning and used to get me stuck in a forever loop of links. So I searched for additonal info:
"Parse javascript"
"Parse website library"
"Parse programming"
Admittedly contrived examples. But the point i am making is pretty clear.
296 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadThe open source project is great and I appreciate the effort that went into making sure we didn't all get (totally) screwed.
Would I use Parse-Server for a new project? Probably not. The state of the BaaS options out there has changed/improved significantly since Parse.com was a thing.
Take a look at this video and tell me this query and the required data denormalization is acceptable.
https://t.co/xd1KUPc8xY
Something as simple as filtering by 2 or more values becomes ridiculously tedious.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26700924/query-based-on-m...
Also since Firebase doesn't allow more than one filtering field with orderByChild(...) I'm guessing Querybase will do all the work on the client. This is less than ideal since the data has to be downloaded first.
Here's a practical example of doing joins with Firebase (written by David East who is also the star of that video you linked): https://github.com/davideast/Querybase
As I found out today if you want the analytics data in CSV, or query it to any level that's useful beyond "We have 5 users in Stockholm on KitKat", you'll need the next service tier up, which is $25 per month per project.
But if you want basic analytics, then it's free & easy.
https://medium.com/@Pier/firebase-the-great-the-meh-and-the-...
Don't get me wrong, Firebase has a lot of good things going on, but the bad aspects make it unsuitable for a large variety of projects.
Firebase Back4app Backendless
Happy to answer any questions, or get some current devs there into the conversation to help out.
The way everyone seems to use it, in my experience, is giving the client credentials to manipulate the full database which is absolutely insane. Obviously this is not good practice but every single parse project I've gotten thrown into already did this and it was a significant amount of work to move it to be more secure and NOT do that. I think the way it's created makes it very, very easy to make bad security choices.
It's also basically a RESTful CRUD. That's mostly it minus some, mostly minor, bells and whistles. You can already do this with about 20 different open source stacks very easily and you're not stuck using this parse technology.
I can't articulate just how much trouble parse has given me. I even took an app and re-wrote its entire backend away from parse significantly faster than doing a handful of updates.
I can sympathize with this. I work on a dynamic API security scanner, and the vast majority of the Parse APIs I've scanned have either used API keys with full read/write permissions on the DB, or have left the database in development mode, essentially allowing anyone with an API key to modify the schema of the database.
Parse was a very cool product, but most setups I've seen didn't take advantage of the (sometimes hard to find) security features Parse provides.
Not to disagree with your overall assessment. I'm generally wary of these swiss-knife frameworks - they're written for a particular use case in mind, and if your project doesn't fit that, you may go through contortions to get things working smoothly.
That's fantastic! I never kept track of which version(s) I worked on but I had transitioned one project from Parse to Parse Server and it was still able to work this way but I'm glad they made progress to try and force better security.
So instead of making HTTP calls to directly modify the DB you make HTTP calls to cloud code functions you wrote which then verify who you are and only modify what you should be able to modify.
You guys are aweosme!
As a shameless plug though, there are other Open Source alternatives though - we wrote a migration guide for ours: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Migrating-from-Parse .
IIRC the Parse homepage used to have this, but ever since the shutdown notice (so, for the past year) the homepage has largely been useless.
Attracting new users unfamiliar with the technology seems at best secondary ( and possibly, unwelcome) to the Parse Server community now.
That said, I never used it, I saw it appear, had a look, decided what it offered was too rudimentary to be scalable, and moved on.
That said, as an open source offering, it's quite interesting.
This post answers the basic question, what is parse:
http://blog.parse.com/announcements/what-is-parse-server/
I'm still unclear. It's some sort of hosted database+services?
From my reading it seems like a generic rest service. I suppose like COTS for rest services.
perhaps this http://rawrmaan.com/why-parse-failed/ might be a better explanation ?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backend_as_a_service
[1] https://firebase.google.com/docs/
This is a major failing of a lot of open-source projects and a lot of real companies as well. Fortunately Wikipedia often provides some background. It's my go-to place whenever I'm confronted with some un-navigable home page filled with hipster jargon about how a company wants to "empower" me with "cloud" "solutions".
Here's a brief history of Parse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(company)
See inside /bin/parse-server:
The same with the package.json, it points to /lib/index.js.However there is no /lib folder, apparently its name is /src. So there is basically no possible way that is even able to run. How is this possible? Either someone linked /src to /lib (doesn't make sense) or they changed the name of the folder and didn't change anything else.
https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server/blob/master/pa...
I generally hate to see projects fail, but in this case I'm not terribly upset. I think that people were getting sucked into the ease of getting apps up and running quickly, then spending 2-3x the effort getting past that initial stage versus doing it in a more traditional stack.
Perhaps the open-source server might give the community some opportunity to fix the many, many glaring bugs and problems, but I have felt like the specific design of Parse itself was just too flawed to succeed.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10056033
Many would be happy to fail like this!
Facebook acquires Parse, an app-support company, for $85 million
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/26/business/la-fi-tn-fa...
My company came out of a similar place with Firebase. The initial version of our product was written 100% against Firebase. This was absolutely a good choice when it was made, but -- surprise! -- two years later, we had to start involving other databases. Was it harder than any other two-years-in scaleup? I didn't find it so. And we still use it where it makes sense.
I don't have specific experience with Firebase, but I believe that from what I've heard from others using it, has a much better design that would survive much longer in the face of growth.
You say that you had to involve other databases two years in? The startups I've seen using parse are failing over to alternative technology much, much sooner.
The above two things as you said made Parse very inflexible once you get beyond prototype phase.
I think i solved all of your objections in my product (http://graphqlapi.com) which puts the database at the center and the schema drives the api. Internally it uses PostgREST to which i've been a core contributor for more then a year now ... how time flies :)
If prototyping tools are done right, I think they are valuable and awesome.
It's true that you don't build api's with them the way you would with a more traditional stack but you can build real products with this a lot faster. This style of building APIs clicks faster with people that use (and trust) Postgres
Very interesting interview with Parse founder in its heyday: https://soundcloud.com/heavybit/caveat-founder-ep-1-featurin...
On finding an interesting market @ 13:30: Evidently the Parse folks discovered they were dealing with an agency building an application for the Food Network. The agency needed SLAs/enterprise contracts and Parse found a $$ customer base
It also wouldn't take any significant time given developers could just push the final source and docs into a Github repo with a license. Or just dump it as a zip on the web. That's nothing. Also a good chance that at least one ex-developer would like to do it just so their work wasn't totally wasted.
Assuming the cost of open sourcing something is zero, even if it's just a zip dump, is usually not correct.
So, yeah, I'll take those corrections.
Exporting data in JSON format is no longer supported. The featured has been left broken without any explanation, and they disabled the ability to contact them in regards to data export.
Mediocre link on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_access_object
I'm in favor of DAOs and use them myself but they don't have anything to do with what I was talking about.
Like I said it does help but it's not a panacea.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522602
Because the title of this post is "Parse.com is shutting down today".
Same with a lot of developer tools. (This is sometimes bad. It is still taking a long time for people to migrate to Python 3.x, and the transition from CVS/SVN to Git and other DVCS was pretty slow.)
Given that your equity package at a large company would be is late and 50 times that per year yeah the engineers didn't come out ahead so it's a fail.
Are you at liberty to discuss the actual reasons and shed a bit more light on why things went down the way they did?
Side note, your product was unbelievably popular at my university. Parse made getting a functional DB up and running for courses and side projects completely painless and a no-brainer for tight deadlines and PoCs.
I’d like to get my data out, but both options for exporting data via the dashboard are broken. They also disabled the ability to contact them in regards to the export data functionality.
>When your app is disabled, you will not be able to access the data browser or export any data, and your applications will no longer be able to access the Parse API.
The prior export feature that allowed data to be exported in JSON format was great, but that was left broken without any explantation.
There doesn't appear be any way to simply export data anymore.
I've already seen the notification when opening an app that it might perform slowly since it is not supported (or something along those lines).
They offer a interesting product but i think at this moment it has the exact same problem that Parse had (my other comment in this thread), you don't have access to the raw data, hope they will do that in the future (provide direct access to the source database), it will certainly be a more interesting/flexible service
I'd be very keen on hearing your experience getting started building something on Graphcool!
In general GraphQL provides many advantages over a traditional REST like API provided by most BaaS. It frees you from the need for proprietary SDKs and reduces vendor lock-in.
Here is a quick way how you can get started: https://www.graph.cool/docs/quickstart
In the beginning I started out trying to host my own Parse servers, since I really liked the concept of Parse as Open Source as well. But running it yourself ruined the whole benefit of Parse.com. As a startup it is not my core business to run a mobile backend a first, but to create an awesome user experience in the mobile app.
Sashido's pricing model is also clearer than Parse.com's, charging per request instead of request/sec. Yu also HAVE to pay at least $4.95 that makes it less likely for them to shutdown due to lack of revenue.
I can really recommend sashabdo! Also if you've not been using Parse.com.
I am curious if you've ever looked at PostgREST, i think i've seen Tikhon among ppl who starred it on github. Any comment on it? Thanks
Parse failed for a lot of reasons but I hated it because the documentation was terrible at the beginning and used to get me stuck in a forever loop of links. So I searched for additonal info:
"Parse javascript"
"Parse website library"
"Parse programming"
Admittedly contrived examples. But the point i am making is pretty clear.