Parse Blog

San Francisco * Parse * Developer Evangelist * We're a fast growing platform for mobile development. We have over 25,000 apps on the platform and our customers include well known YC startups, NFL teams, and great national brands. We're looking for our first Developer Evangelist. This role is for a hacker that wears a marketing and teaching hat. You will be responsible for getting the word out about Parse and getting more developers on the platform. This is a cross functional role that involves aspects of marketing, community support, content production and software development. The perfect candidate is passionate about Parse, platforms, and talking with and educating other developers. You should be a developer yourself and understand the problems that developers encounter. This role will play a pivotal part at Parse. You should be fearless about taking on new challenges and owning important metrics inside the company. Parks: Great location (right near the ferry building in SF), catered lunch & dinner, your choice of equipment, great insurance, and most importantly - ownership in terms of equity and product. More information here: https://parse.com/jobs https://parse.com/about http://blog.parse.com/

> There are many situations and styles where callbacks are perfectly adequate, and promises offer no benefit Promises are superior in general, I guess that has been discussed already[1], many times. Promises may indeed offer just an insignificant benefit sometimes (you can even call it just a different style), for example when you are first writing a monolithic prototype. In this worst case, you would simply make a giant chain of ".then" methods, any your gain is you can get creative with the error handling if you want. However, the greatest benefit revels itself later: The composability that comes with them will help you immensely when refactoring. [1]: One example: http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/302456/9451 Another: http://blog.parse.com/learn/engineering/whats-so-great-about-javascrip…

Good documentation is a key part - Good summary of best practices for documentation: https://bocoup.com/weblog/documenting-your-api - Tips for good api doc design: http://blog.parse.com/learn/engineering/designing-great-api-docs/

Couple of companies come to mind: * Realm.io has successfully positioned themselves as a thought leader in swift development for iOS by producing solid blog content and leading the Swift SF meetups (+ contributing to open-source projects). * Crashlytics/Fabric.io is more interesting -- my experience with them has been entirely word-of-mouth (but they have a big presence at Twitter's developer conference/WWDC/Google IO, too). * Parse generally has interesting, high-quality technical blog content: (https://blog.parse.com).

Great to see more things go open-source, and to target Android first! Phone-based login is quite cool, and becoming very popular in new apps. To be mildly snarky, I would've called it Enterprise Digits. https://github.com/twitter/digits-android/tree/master/digits/src/main/… I recently built a sample implementation of phone-based login (on iOS) using Parse + Twilio, rather than Digits which was not available. A co-worker added a web interface to the same app, and another is building an Android client. At the Twilio Signal conference last week, it was a very popular demonstration. Our blog: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/phone-based-login-can-you-dig-it/ and our repo: https://github.com/parseplatform/anyphone

No, I took a different approach. Any normal cron job that wants to be run only once (per cluster) grabs a zookeeper lock. Those that fail to acquire the lock exit and try again during the next interval. This is implemented with a wrapper around the cron job that takes care of locking: https://github.com/ParsePlatform/Ops/blob/master/tools/get_zk_lock. More details here: http://blog.parse.com/2013/03/11/implementing-failover-for-random-cron…

I think async/await is semantically similar to the promises pattern [1] but different to the Go concurrent models using channels. What the compiler does with await/async is quite interesting [2]. Essentially it takes your await/async code and turns the related code into a state machine which keeps track of how control should be switched between the callee and the await keyword (and uses Task for the async bit). [1] http://blog.parse.com/2013/01/29/whats-so-great-about-javascript-promi… [2] http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/535635/Async-Await-and-the-Generat…

Not related. But their blog served over HTTPS throws an error: https://blog.parse.com/

Parse's blog has a pretty good article on documenting APIs[0], with links to a number of nicely one API documentations (not dropbox's, but Github's, Stripe's, Backbone's, Mailgun's and their own) [0] http://blog.parse.com/2012/01/11/designing-great-api-docs/

Other complaints aside, I just wanted to say that I quite like the "wall of text" approach. Thinking back to the article on API documentation from Parse (http://blog.parse.com/2012/01/11/designing-great-api-docs/) I'll agree that having everything on one page, quickly accessible, is a good way to do. By breaking up the page with relevant headings and sub-headings the docs can be made much less daunting (as they are here). I'd be much more annoyed with having to click between pages too often.

Flynn co-founder here. Great question. We just consider ourselves to be a normal company that happens to build open source tools. We also try to make money in ways that don't interfere with the open nature of what we build. There are lots of different kinds of companies whose engineers primarily work on open source projects. In most cases where their core "product" is an open source technology they also sell commercial support, usually to large companies who need an SLA. Others (like us) sell managed services as well. We made the decision before we started the company to make anything we ever asked users to run on their own machines permissively licensed open source and just be careful with our trademark (like Mozilla is[1]). That leaves the door open for closed-source SaaS in the future but gives our users (and investors) a clear set of expectations about how and what we'll build. I think it's important for companies to be as clear as possible about how and why they license their code, what choices they'll make in the future, and what happens when the company changes hands. It would be great to see something like an "open source pledge" where founders/the company could contractually commit to either a final open source release before closing (like Parse did[2]) or staying open after being acquired (like Sun didn't after being acquired by Oracle [3]). [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/ [2]…

Wasn't it? I didn't use them, but their shutdown notice [0] reads like they opensourced whatever is needed to keep client apps running. I agree it sucks though. The code gives you more time, but since it's not maintained and actively developed anymore you still need to migrate to another platform eventually. [0] http://blog.parse.com/announcements/moving-on/

Parse was an API as a service. The idea being that you don't need your own servers and parse would provide API, database, push messaging and so on. 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/

The open source Parse Server offers more benefits than hosted parse.com. Many of the benefits are outlined in this blog post: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/what-is-parse-server/ Whatever you are building with Parse Server, Nodechef can help you get there faster. https://www.nodechef.com/parse-server

Not sure about serverless, but it looks looks like all you need is a mongodb + node.js host. Parse released the server. Here's article on integrating parse with heroku. http://blog.parse.com/announcements/introducing-heroku-parse/ Completely out of my space but trying to help.

They have already did that: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/introducing-parse-server-and-the-d…

Parse Server: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/introducing-parse-server-and-the-d… Other than that, I'm looking for something myself.

Good day to make everyone aware of this project as parse is closing down: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/moving-on/ :)

Wonder why they actually shut down? Seems like it was an unexpected decision. http://blog.parse.com/events/announcing-f8-2016/

I am happy to see that they're not using any of the insulting language that would land them on http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/. FYI, here's the announcement of the acquisition from April 25, 2013: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/the-future-of-parse/ Relevant bits: Q: Will my Parse app be affected in any way? No. Q: Will Parse apps have to use Facebook functionality? No. Q: Will Parse honor my contract? Yes, of course.

They open sourced an API server that is fully compatible that you could host yourself http://blog.parse.com/announcements/introducing-parse-server-and-the-d…

Sure. Let's say I have a Group collection, a User collection, and a Post collection. A Post has a pointer to a Group and is public to that group. I would like to specify that each Post should be able to be read only by Users who belong to that group, by having a pointer to that Group in their "group" field. I could specify this permission at a class level as a Parse Query. Basically I want a more powerful version of this: http://blog.parse.com/learn/secure-your-app-from-the-data-browser-with…

Thanks Andrew! Transparency and community involvement is our top priority here. Also, we're doing a series of blog posts that will cover each part of the SDK stack. Lots of learnings to share from our kick ass SDK team. Here's the first: http://blog.parse.com/learn/the-parse-sdk-whats-inside/

OP is suggesting that C# is competing with languages people are picking to replace Ruby or Python. A recent example is Parse[1] moving to Go. C# and .NET was their second choice. [1]http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-to-go-and-s…

This page links to a summary. The source article is at http://blog.parse.com/learn/how-we-moved-our-api-from-ruby-to-go-and-s… . The saddest part, and an example of why I think Postel's Robustness principle is not useful, is: > The hardest part of the rewrite was dealing with all the undocumented behaviors and magical mystery bits that you get with Rails middleware. Parse exposes a REST API, and Rails HTTP processing is built on a philosophy of “be liberal in what you accept”. So developers end up inadvertently sending API requests that are undocumented or even non-RFC compliant … but Rails middleware cleans them up and handles it fine.

Then how on earth is it possible to build Parse.com with MongoDB? http://blog.parse.com/announcements/mongodb-rocksdb-parse/

Two suggestions for csv -> api: 1. Parse: http://blog.parse.com/2012/05/22/import-your-csv-data-to-parse/ 2. csv to api https://github.com/project-open-data/csv-to-api Though if your data really is as simple as a single table (a csv files tend to be), you could probably put together a sinatra or express app in a day or two depending on your skill level.

Related: someone has reproduced the beep in Javascript for posterity: http://blog.parse.com/2013/02/27/reproducing-the-macintosh-boot-beep-f…

Here's another similar article by the same guy, Christophe Tauziet: http://blog.parse.com/2012/11/09/animating-the-cloud-modules-icon/

What makes Webscript better than other BaaS providers that have more advanced functionality available? http://blog.parse.com/2012/09/11/welcoming-cloud-code-to-the-parse-fam… https://cloudmine.me/docs/servercode