As far as similar open-source systems, it seems like Mozilla's Kinto compares favorably to Parse after it's code is released: http://kinto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/overview.html There's a nice table there comparing the different services' features.
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.
I love me some Firebase, but I don't trust Google for a second. They kill projects off all the time, with no regard to the communities built around them.
I'd like another answer like. "We are thinking about providing a community version that one can deploy on its own servers, then we provide the IaaS when the customer might want to scale". If Parse had an opersource version to begin with, it would have been much much more successful and people would have been less worried about building on a third party platform.
If Firebase closes tomorrow there will be no migration strategy for people who built their infrastructure around Firebase.
> Firebase is very complementary to Google's other product offerings
Google is a big org. Tomorrow some upper executive you don't even know might decide your product doesn't add value anymore. You know that.
To be fair, the same thing could have been said about Parse yesterday. Thankfully they've done as good a job as can be expected in releasing an open source implementation.
But indeed, I might have stuck with Firebase had there been something like that available. Instead, we switched while patiently waiting for a js implementation that supported offline sync.
Any updates on the availability of that?
This demonstrates a pretty strong misunderstanding of how google actually works.
2. Plenty of companies kill plenty of products. They just don't bother to announce it, they let it die quietly and silently
> You could just use Parse. We're not going anywhere.
I'm one of the Ramses devs http://ramses.tech and we've been working on related problems from an "executable spec" angle.
Seems backend automation is about abstracting storage/syncing and also about making development fast and accessible to different skill levels.