Parse for PHP: A Fractal of Rad Design | Hacker News Reader

Parse for PHP: A Fractal of Rad Design

blog.parse.com

46 pointsjamesjyu25 comments

Hope you can appreciate the tongue in cheek blog title... Had a good time building this, and very open to criticism and contributions. Just keep it in good taste, please. :) I think this opens up a lot of neat avenues for working with Parse, such as import/export, integration with other systems, another avenue for background-job-type maintenance, etc..

Good job Fosco :)

In the spirit of keeping this in good taste, i'll try to phrase this nicely: Please refrain from referring to TIOBE. Popularity contests are not the best measure for anything from the start, however TIOBE manages to step beyond that failing by employing a known-broken algorithm to generate their results. This algorithm is described on their own site, with the faultiness stemming from the simple fact that results are skewed towards languages with shorter names, or names that overlap heavily with real-world objects:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d...

So please, do not even acknowledge them.

Edit: Also, after browsing around a bit on your website, i can't tell what Parse is. At all. It seems to be some kind of VPS provider, but not. Maybe a mix of all the Amazon remote services? For cellphone apps?

Lastly, your website doesn't handle browsers with increased minimum font sizes (something that is amazing for people with bad eyes) very gracefully. The priving page displays the most obvious styling brokenness, with the slider bar having two rows, and the background jobs counter being offset downwards by one row.

> In the spirit of keeping this in good taste, i'll try to phrase this nicely:

TIOBE isn't great, but at least you know what their algorithm is, and it is certainly not worth implying you would normally _not_ be nice to someone for referencing it.

> it is certainly not worth implying its worth _not_ being nice to someone about it for referencing it.

That is just you reading things into that which i did not mean to imply at all. ;)

I have strong things to say about TIOBE, which could be expressed with extreme accuracy in a very concise manner, and match reality with no deviation. However to do so would be considered impolite by many who have not yet delved into the details of what TIOBE does. As such the above is my attempt to do so politely, sacrificing some accuracy.

As you showed me with your lead though, i seem to have already lost a massive amount of accuracy.

> TIOBE isn't great, but at least you know what their algorithm is

That property is not helpful when they themselves are unwilling to warn readers about the brokenness of their algorithm, and their definition also does not make this obvious. In fact, TIOBE happily publishes their "results" as facts and many people believe them.

What's a good alternative then?

Sites that measure trends in jobs offered for example are both much more accurate AND useful to the general public. One that i know of is http://indeed.com

Parse is a collection of backend services designed to make mobile app development easier. It provides things like cloud storage, authentication, social network integration, push services and analytics.

Parse was also acquired by Facebook for $85M in 2013.

They should hire you to write all their copy. Thanks for explaining. :)

    Here lies
    the spirit of good taste
    peperony and chease

>In the spirit of keeping this in good taste, i'll try to phrase this nicely: Please refrain from referring to TIOBE

I can see from your green user name that you are a new user. HN does not look kindly on that kind of snarkiness you are putting in that comment and it is likely that whatever else you say will be ignore just because of that.

I recommand you rephrase such a statement to be more neutral in the future - you might actually get people to consider your complaint then.

Mithaldu's account is over 1700 days old.

I appreciate your comment, mainly because english is not my native language, and i was not even aware that that phrasing could come across as snarky. It was certainly not intended as snarky. Maybe some cultural disconnect.

How would i phrase that more neutrally?

(No idea why my name would show green to you, maybe because the post is still editable or something.)

"In the spirit of keeping this in good taste, i'll try to phrase this nicely" creates the impression that you would really rather say something nasty, because that would be the correct thing, but instead you don't do this to be 'nice'. Basically, your original sentence, to a 'native' speaker, comes across as the opposite: "TIOBE index is really bad and I'd like to chastise you for bringing it up."

If you truly don't mean to be snarky, a better approach might be: "from what I can tell (implying that you are not certain) the TIOBE index is not a good measure. Here's why I think this is the case:"

Parse seems very awesome, I am only a little concerned with they excessive pricing for the database storage (200 usd/20gb/month)

Actually, you get 20 Gb database / month for free per app. https://parse.com/plans

Right, I was refering to when you need more than that.

Parse DB pricing: $10.00 per GB (after included 20GB)

Amazon S3 pricing: $0.03 per GB

I know it's not apples to apples, but it's way off.

$10/gb is for our database offering. Our file storage is the exact same price as S3.

You do get a lot of free storage to begin with, so it's great for small applications. It's very simple and powerful, but there's a service disruption pretty much every day and there's no point of contact for anything. They just say "use the forum", but 90% of forum answers come from this guy named Hector and he has no idea what he's talking about. I hear the same thing from paid clients, so if you're building something you don't want to be unavailable half the time, just use your own NoSQL implementation.

What are you talking about?

I misread the title blogpost and thought that someone had just hacked the servers and changed it to "A Fractal of Bad Design".

It's a reference to a fairly well-known piece of PHP criticism:

http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Also known as Godwin's law of PHP.

What's the adoption of Cloud Code been like? I think a lot of developers would be turned off by the async api calls (if my understanding is correct). Also, how tight is the sandbox around user code?

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