Just got an email yesterday w/ the announcement…
“…Parse’s hosted services will be fully retired on January 28, 2017. We’re proud that we’ve been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps. Read more on this announcement and what this means for your app here. Thank you for using Parse…”
Super bummed as a I have a pet project I was preparing to release that has it’s back-end built on Parse. I really like their SDK’s and enjoyed the built-in authentication and authorization through ACL’s on the data objects. It also had a more effective query tool than my experiences w/ Firebase and I really loved the back-end, admin dashboard. It definitely had some shortcomings, especially trying to support offline or limited connection use-cases. So, I had started looking at other options. But this feels like the rug just got pulled out from under me. As an aside, there is a funny take on this “incredible journey” process cataloged by Phill Gyford at http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
They have a lot of material that looks really nice to help folks migrate and self-host. And they open-sourced the server and client libraries I think. But, in the end, self-hosting puts management demands back on a hobbyist like myself. Still processing all of this. Anyone else working w/Parse.com for their BaaS care to chime in on your plans moving forward? Or just join in a collective “harumph!!”?
Harumph!
I’m still trying to decide which direction to go with. The suggested Heroku + MongoDB route is tempting, if just because it’d be nice to have the ability to utilize Node.JS on the server side. However this does require more work and money.
I’m also looking at other BaaS solutions out there, but don’t have anything solid at the moment.
How about Firebase?
The same thing happened to Stackmob before, Paypal got it and killed it. Now Facebook kills Parse.
Firebase is now owned by Google, so I don’t think that is going to end because Google is supposed to be more developer friendly. Worst case scenario they would change the name and make it part of Google Cloud.
I took an initial look at Firebase and had a lot of trouble working with it from a query standpoint. Getting the data I wanted was very difficult. The other challenge was architecting the data w/ any level of relational information. There was a very nice ability to handle these tasks in Parse. I lot of this is a weakness from my background of years in SQL work so the different noSQL paradigms are difficult to adjust to. Parse seemed to lower this barrier for me. If I remember, the Firebase architecture is based on a hierarchal db design as opposed to a document db design used by Parse or Mongo.
For now, I have spent some time looking at some combination of Couchbase and PouchDB. It’s core strength would be the ability to handle offline or occasionally connected clients. And the Sync Gateway from Couchbase could be hosted and managed the same as a Parse back-end. The missing parts are authentication and authorization simplicity that I got w/ Parse. Still chewing this all over.
Hmm, I understand.
Did you look at Amazon’s RDS service? It’s SQL and can be accessed by REST API.
Also, for mobile app development with user logins and data there is Amazon Cognito.
Amazon Mobile Developer Hub has more information and services.
Amazon Services can be manipulated by Amazon Javascript SDK.
I prefer NoSQL because ease of use of the JSON structure.
Any alternative suggesetion where I can find image upload features of Parse along with its NoSQL feature? I could not find an other BaaS with these.