Build an iOS App on Heroku in 10 Minutes

Unlike Storyboards, the effort you put into writing against a REST API isn't wasted if you decide to roll a new, more complex REST API (which Heroku is fantastic for).

The whole point is to get the developer up-and-running as quickly as possible. Code for the API you'll eventually have, but get by with a rough scaffolding so you can experiment and iterate rapidly.

In the meantime, you can mount Rack::CoreData (https://github.com/mattt/rack-core-data), which powers the Buildpack, alongside other authentication middleware to create a workable production application.

1) Parse is more full-featured. Parse includes significant automatic support for things like modeling users, comes with UI components for e.g. sign up, and includes e.g. a UITableViewController subclass to automatically support things like automatic paging.

2) While Parse's documentation is superb, these features come at the cost of flexibility (though you don't have to use all of them, of course -- it could just be a REST backend if you wanted it to be, like the heroku buildpack seen here). You'll tie your iOS app to Parse with PFObjects, whereas you're much more flexible with a backend agnostic approach that you'll get just using a REST web service.

3) The Heroku buildpack will probably tie better to CoreData. There might be a clean approach for this with Parse (when I used it I was pretty new to iOS) but I ended up having PFObject and Core Data representations of objects, which is rather clunky. Conversely, if you aren't using Core Data, this build pack wouldn't be helpful for you.

Some conclusions: 1) people who are learning to write iOS apps and don't have experience writing a web server should probably use Parse because it will be easier. It is my suspicion, as a few others have commented, that you will run into problems like "Oh, how should I deal with user accounts and passwords" that Parse will handle, but you'll have to figure out if using the buildpack. The buildpack comes with all the advantages you'd associate with Heroku -- other people know what those are better than me.

Let me also say that Mattt Thompson is an inspiration (check out his github and NSHipster.com, which are fantastic and foreshadowed this project) and I predict this buildpack will be as awesome as he can make it.

- They are both well backed (Heroku by Salesforce money/profits, Parse by great investors), have awesome founders, talented employees, and are both YC companies.

- Parse is pretty much 100% mobile focused. This is their bread and butter.

- Heroku is Polyglot and spans dozens of platforms on multiple OS's, with no real focus.

I think this comes down to where you run the rest of your stack, how tightly you want things integrated, and which service is the easiest to use and most reliable. Is mobile 99% of what you do? Parse is probably the best choice. Is mobile 25% of your business and you're already using Heroku for everything else? I could go either way here. We use Heroku and AWS to drive 100% of our platform, but we're also not mobile (yet). I personally know the Parse guys and they are outstanding at what they do and growing at a phenomenal rate, so when we do dive into mobile I'll likely be giving them a shot first.