Open-sourced Parse now supports push notifications | Hacker News Reader

Open-sourced Parse now supports push notifications

blog.parse.com

158 pointsjamesjyu28 comments

This is by far the best shutdown of a service I've seen in recent memory. (Though they're still getting a post on 'Our Incredible Journey'[0])

[0]http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

This is really fantastic and looks like the parse team is delivering on the promises (https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server/issues/56)!

I am looking forward to seeing the dashboard now :-)

Yea I am really hoping they have approval to release the dashboard as its a majority of the value of the Parse service.

We do! I'm in the middle of adding the schemas API to parse-server, without which the dashboard won't work.

I wonder whether open-sourcing Parse tools could increase its use rather than be used to shut it down.

We have been having that discussion internally at the company I work for. After the initial shock wore off and we started deciding what we would do with the projects currently on Parse, we realized that this could very well be a good thing. Before this, we were not able to use Parse for larger clients or clients with specific database hosting needs, but that may no longer be an issue. I'm excited to see what the future holds for Open Source Parse.

We spent a few days investigating alternatives and then decided to just wait and see what happens over the next few months. We want to switch to DynamoDB instead of MongoDB due to cheaper hosting costs through AWS for the amount of data we use. There's already someone working on cleaning up the DB code to allow for switching DB providers.

In my study of Dynamo DB I found that it might actually be more expensive than managed Mongo DB. But I didn't get a chance to test this out because of lack of budget as we decided to build against Mongo DB rather than build for both and check which one is more expensive.

The problem with Dynamo DB is that one needs to provision the read and write capacity in advance, which means that one needs to over provision in order to be sure. Also even for things like exporting database which requires lots of reads in short time, one needs to provision the read capacity. This can make the back ups very expensive. However I am basing this from my study of their docs as we were building our application. (A chat server).

It will be good if somebody can share their actual experience about Dynamo DB especially from the perspective of cost. Yes, almost unlimited scalability is very attractive, but I found that I had to think about data access patterns a lot to ensure that we will stay in acceptable read write quota for Dynamo DB. This was causing a lot of delay in our MVP. So we decided to go with Mongo DB which we knew we could scale fairly beyond our MVP and may be rewrite the data access layer later on if we achieve a mass that requires a switch to something like Dynamo Db or manual sharding.

I think it certainly will. I have always avoided Parse because I was worried what would happen if it was shut down and the limitations on extensibility due to the previously closed codebase. Now those are no longer concerns.

Smart quotes in code that's meant to be copy-pasted. That's a paddlin'.

Fixed! Stupid Wordpress with their smart quotes converter.

Is the idea that you're already using Parse in your mobile application? Or can this be used as a standalone tool to enable push notifications in existing, non Parse apps?

I found it fairly trivial to do push notifications with Node and pre existing libraries.

There are many apps using Parse only for Push, so it's good for both... But, you've already got that solved (in a similar fashion, this is using node modules.)

I'm confused. Can someone please point me to material that explains when to use a parse-like solution?

Very quick turnaround. Glad the devs are serious about keeping Parse open and available.

This is the main use I had for parse, so I will certainly be checking it out

Parse going open source is all good... But is it only me that considered one of the best things with Parse being their very generous free tier?

Probably not, seeing as they had to close their doors.

A micro VM on the big cloud providers is only a few dollars a month, and should you need to scale its a lot cheaper than $100/month for 10 API calls per second!

was waiting for this!

I had written a project which is based on parse. I can not afford to change it by now. I am so disappointed by startup services that close up suddenly.

They give you an entire year of warning to find somewhere else, give out the tools for others to offer a compatible service and they "close up suddenly"?

Hey, I'm sorry to hear that. I know it's really frustrating when you rely on a service that closes down. I'm curious - can you not afford to change it because it's too much work, or can you not afford to change it because the alternatives are too expensive? Maybe there is a way forward that is not as bothersome as you expect.

I'm involved in a project that uses Parse, and by this point the client SDKs are so thoroughly embedded into our codebase that changing to another backend system would indeed be a fair bit of work. Apparently modular design is a thing.

Fortunately, Parse has provided us with more advanced warning and open-source support that I could ever have expected. This is consistent with my experience using the service; you probably don't remember, but you personally responded to a tweet I sent regarding an outage, and followed up to make sure that the issue was resolved for me.

Many thanks to you and your team for all your hard work.

Well the nice thing with this migration is that you don't have to rip out the client SDKs. After migrating the backend to the open source stuff, you just have to change the serverURL and you can point the same mobile app to the new backend.

Thanks for your kind words ;-)

Yup! And hosting the Node server on Heroku/MongoLab should be a reasonable solution, especially if the open source community takes this and runs with it.

I just want to say it is not fair when you have done something for your clients after some years they tell you it does not work.

It will get some more time from me or money from my client to get around setting up a server moving data to it find and change the url or probably fixing server mis config.

They will take it as my mis responsibility.

I would not use their service for my client if I know it going to close that at first place.

The last but not the least I can not figure out why fucking hacker news down vote me for 4 points.

Can you host it or pay someone to host it?

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