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prezjordan
I swear, Mattt must code for 40 hours a day. The sheer quantity (and quality!) of his ships is mind-boggling.

This looks fantastic, I'll definitely be checking this out!

Gertig
After reading the first two paragraphs I thought that this has to be mattt! The man is a machine.
marcomonteiro
Same. I think I've read every post in NSHipster at least twice.
ryderm
I havn't done enough iOS to really speak intelligently about it, but this looks like a great place to start without limiting flexibility.

Although "an extensible open-source mobile backend framework" seems to say that it also applies to non iOS, it doesn't seem that it does. Is it more suited for iOS, or iOS only?

dirtyaura
Many services that Helios provides are either iOS specific backend integrations (Push Notifications & Store Kit transaction verifications) or has client-side components (A/B testing, better client-side networking libraries)
keeran
Good to see some potential (and OSS!) competition for Parse :)
bdotdub
This looks awesome - a Parse.com you can deploy yourself!
kiernan
Also check this one out then, similar but with no mobile client SDK (other than a javascript): http://deployd.com
coob
I've recently been working on a Node backend for IAP verification and providing signed S3 URLs for downloadable content - something like this would have halved the time it took. Good work Matt!
julien_c
Interesting – I'm thinking about implementing something just like that right now. Did you find good resources about this?
saddino
I've been thinking that Parse (and StackMob, Kinvey et al) need to provide a similar self-deployable solution at a reasonable price; this might be the motivation they need to do so.
tenfourty
This might cannibalise their business model in such an undeveloped market, they are all about lock in currently. There is definitely space in the market for an open source based MBaaS/BaaS that allows you to roll your own or use their hosted version.
nathan_long
I'm impressed that the name includes the substring "iOS".
Gertig
Really looking forward to trying this out, owning your data definitely goes a long way.
juanbyrge
NICE!!! So much better than parse
dracoli
This is really nice. Huge time saver for apps that only need a basic backend for certain functionalities.

Can this potentially also work for other mobile platforms?

andrewljohnson
Neat, I already use mattt's CLI tool for interfacing with the Apple dev site: https://github.com/mattt/cupertino
myko
Wow, this is amazing! My least favorite part of iOS dev is visiting the horrendous dev portal. Thanks for the link.
missenlinx
Really cool! I hated that website. Thanks
panzerboy
Cool, didn't even know about that one. Installed, thanks!
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neya
Wow, Thank you SO MUCH!

Admittedly, this is one of the best things that ever happened to open source w.r.t mobile development in the last few months!

miles_matthias
It's really awesome to see Heroku getting into the mobile BaaS industry. I think they have a lot of expertise that they can lend and I'm even more excited that the project is open source, free, and deployable. Looking forward to using this!
tamersalama
Can't wait to integrated clients with RubyMotion
obilgic
This is basically a combination of these four gems:

    https://github.com/mattt/rack-in-app-purchase
    https://github.com/mattt/rack-core-data
    https://github.com/mattt/rack-passbook
    https://github.com/mattt/rack-push-notification
That is why codebase looks very clean and simple.
scoot
That amounts to saying mattt is a machine because mattt is a machine. Building on the shoulders of... himself!
iandanforth
This looks wonderful, thanks for all the hard work! I hope this expands to encompass other platforms and languages.
lnanek2
Wow, iOS only when Android is 75% shipping smartphones?
BillySquid
is really hard to release a new product running for both environments in the first try. Give it some time for android.
phil
You should totally submit a pull request adding Android support!
jarjoura
MixPanel reports 60% iOS vs 40% Android split when actual app usage comes into the mix. Probably why backend frameworks specialize in iOS first.
MrUnderhill
Off topic: The ultra light custom fonts a lot of websites use nowadays (looks like "Bariol" on this site), do they look bad to anyone other than me? Both in Firefox and Opera (Linux) many of the lines are invisible or barely visible (example: http://i.imgur.com/Yk0Q83G.png ). In Chrome they look a little bit better.
nekopa
On my iPad all the letter 'D's have disappeared. It's quite disconcerting.
evolve2k
Same on my iPhone, all the 'd' characters don't show up properly at all. Had to read the article zoomed right up so that the spider thin d characters were visible at all. Please change the font.
julien_c
Looks great in Mac OS.
nathos
In my experience, the issues w/ thin font weights tend to be worse on Windows & Linux. Worth keeping in mind if you're using these fonts (particularly if you're using some of the free fonts from Google Web Fonts that aren't necessarily well-hinted)
grinich
Looks like your browser isn't properly doing sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
degenerate
Helios is also the moniker of a very "cloud-like" (ambient) composer named Keith Kenniff. His music is excellent for coding when you need that superior downtempo thinking background noise.

My favorite album: https://soundcloud.com/_type/sets/helios-eingya

His soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff

publicfig
While we're discussing him, it's worth checking out another project of his, Goldmund. It's piano centric music that really embraces the minimalist aspects of some of the newer neo-classical artists (think Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter, Nils Frahm or Dustin O'Halloran).

A lot of the music is on Spotify, and here's a link to a set of it on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff/sets/goldmund

usmanity
I had no idea Helios is also Goldmund. The sound is so different. I found them both on Spotify.
kreek
I thought the same thing when I saw this. Even if you haven't heard of Helios you've probably heard Keith's music on TV or online. The website for his film, tv, and ad work is http://www.unseen-music.com/
mtp0101
Why would they name their application Helios? It collides with Eclipse.
m2mapps
This is really great.

A massive limitation of Parse.com is with their Javascript SDK - you have to expose your app keys to the client and the SDK doesn't work at all on any version of IE unless you have SSL enabled.

adelevie
1) There are Access Control Lists which should help with that. Also, note that Parse gives you a Javascript key which is separate from your master key. Though I'm a longtime Parse user, I have not spent much time with the JS SDK on the client (as opposed to Cloud Code, where no keys are exposed), so I can't really say that this just "solves the problem."

2) Wouldn't any similarly-situated Javascript library face the same problems, with Access Control Lists probably being the most practical solution?

3) Moreover, with any mobile backend, you must assume that the keys that ship within the code of your native app will be public. So you should be using Access Control Lists if you're using the iOS SDK, for example.