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Facebook Is Shuttering the Parse Developer Platform (cio.com)

itwbennett writes: In a blog post yesterday, Facebook announced it is shutting down the Parse developer platform as of Jan. 28, 2017, giving developers a year to move off its hosted services. This comes as a bit of a surprise, considering that just last month, Parse launched a set of new tools to help developers work with Apple's watchOS and tvOS last, and at the time, Parse Product Manager Supratik Lahiri promised more updates in the future. Developers who don't want to rewrite their applications to work with a new back-end service provider can follow a migration guide from Parse to make their applications work with an independent MongoDB instance and a new open-source Parse Server that's running on Salesforce-owned developer platform provider Heroku.

48 comments

  1. Another day... by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... another web API bites the bullet and all the kids will have to go learn yet another flash in the pan interface to connect to some moronic social site to scrape bullshit data to pass to an app they can sell to idiots.

    1. Re:Another day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

      Yawn... I'm a jaded moron who likes to think they're cool on Slashtard. I hate everyone and everything. I don't need social media because I'm such a bore that no one would friend or follow me. I like The Cure and The Smiths and I have a handlebar mustache.

    2. Re:Another day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, exactly like you, then.

    3. Re:Another day... by Hylandr · · Score: 1

      Posts like this prove the need exists for a score higher than 10.

      Best summary ever.

      --
      ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
  2. Re: Er so what? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

    you might care, if only we had https://www.google.com/search?...">ever heard of Parse. At this point it seems pointless to go

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  3. This is why by 110010001000 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This is why you should avoid corporate controlled APIs and languages. Things like Rust, etc can just get pulled away at the last moment, leaving you without any future path and support. Lesson learned.

    1. Re:This is why by verbatim · · Score: 4, Informative

      over-reaction. They're giving a migration path that basically lets you run it self-hosted.

      --
      Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
    2. Re:This is why by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      Actually I think the plan is to migrate to another host provider. Until that one decides to drop it.

    3. Re:This is why by rgbscan · · Score: 1

      The migration document clearly shows you can run it self hosted if you choose, as long as your environment supports Node.js

    4. Re:This is why by Lisandro · · Score: 2

      So, whoever wins, we lose :)

  4. Kardashions by sycodon · · Score: 3, Funny

    This is the technological equivalent of obsessing over some Kardashion boob job.

    --
    When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
  5. Why is it named Parse? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Looks like another crappy butt^H^H^H^Hcloud service. Why should it be named "Parse"?

    If you can't write a parser and you literally need one in the "clouds", you've failed CS 101.

    1. Re: Why is it named Parse? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, only idiots leverage SDKs. Real men write their software stack from scratch.

    2. Re: Why is it named Parse? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, they said only idiots use *cloud* parsers. There's a big difference, nimrod.

    3. Re: Why is it named Parse? by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 1

      I really can't see doing much heavy lifting with scratch...
      https://scratch.mit.edu/
      It does look like kids might have some fun with it.

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
    4. Re:Why is it named Parse? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 1

      The obligatory Obligatory XKCD

      And, for "real programmers write in....:" The Story of Mel.

  6. It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    I find it very interesting that you mention Rust! Although it's a programming language, you're absolutely right, it could very well put its users in the same awful situation that Parse's users now find themselves in.

    Rust is a product of Mozilla, which as we know has had some tough times lately. They lost their Google sponsorship, and have had to settle for Yahoo instead. Users are fleeing Firefox left and right, and Firefox is pretty much the only product of Mozilla's that still has some users. Firefox now likely has a market share within the single-digit percentages. Once its users are gone, Mozilla's influence will wane significantly. It does not help that pretty much all of their other products have either been put on ice (Thunderbird), are considered obsolete (Bugzilla), have failed (Persona, Firefox OS), or are making little progress (Servo).

    Some will claim that Rust is an "open source project", but I'm not convinced that's true. Rather, I think it's a Mozilla project with source code that's publicly available. Maybe they'll take contributions from outsiders, but it's people from Mozilla calling the shots and controlling the project. If it weren't for Mozilla pushing it forward, I don't think we'd see much real progress at all.

    It does not help that many in the Rust community, including some prominent members, are former Ruby on Railers who fled that community when the hype started to die down after people realized how problematic Ruby and Ruby on Rails can be. If these people fled the Ruby community so quickly, what's to say they won't do the same to Rust when its hype disappears? We're already seeing the Rust hype start to die down, now that 1.0 was finally released (after many delays), and users are finding out that it isn't as useful as it's claimed it was.

    Then there are the issues of Rust having only a single implementation, with no others on the horizon. There's also the issue of Rust libraries having a tendency to go unmaintained after the sole contributor loses interest and abandons the project. Many Rust libraries are just shitty weekend project code dumps to GitHub, so it's not like they were ever even real projects in any sense to start with.

    It just makes so much more sense to go with C++ than it does to use Rust. C++14, and the upcoming C++17, have revolutionized the language. They give just about the same degree of safety as Rust, but without all of the problems of Rust. Best of all, there are multiple independent implementations from separate vendors, so even if say the GCC project were to fail, there would still be Clang and several proprietary implementations to choose from.

    Rust sounds good on the surface, but it leaves me very uneasy. I don't think it's worth considering until there are multiple production-grade implementations of it. Even then, we need to see its community mature, and the library situation vastly improve. That will take many years to happen, at which point we'll likely see C++ offering all of the functionality that Rust offers, plus many other benefits, all coming from a mature and reliable community with a diverse set of players.

    C++ is the future. Rust is not.

    1. Re:It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      C++ is the future.

      Hahahahahahahhaaahahh.

      You've just made my weekend. Congratulations.

    2. Re:It is interesting that you mention Rust! by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Rust will be dead in 5 years, just like Ruby and a long list of other tossed away ridiculous languages. C++ forever! Rust is about as Open Source as Android is (meaning "not really" in practical terms).

    3. Re:It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Lisandro · · Score: 1

      Let me guess. You work on Javascript?

      Like it or not, C++ has been an industry cornerstone for the past 30 years. And it will likely remain that way 30 years from now.

    4. Re:It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Lisandro · · Score: 1

      This is very true. It is kinda sad to see the current state of affairs over at Mozilla, while we're at it.

    5. Re:It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Let me guess. You work on Javascript?

      This is just as meaningful as "Let me guess. You vote for Trump?"

      Like it or not

      Yes.

      C++ has been an industry cornerstone for the past 30 years

      And industries succeeded despite it.

      And it will likely remain that way 30 years from now.

      Prediction is hard, especially those about the future.

    6. Re:It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      LOL! C++ is indeed the future!

      Everything important today is written in C++. LOL! Even Rust's implementation depends on C++, since it uses LLVM which is written in C++! LOL!

      It's the same for pretty much all of the other major competitors to C++ out there. The JVM, the .NET CLR, the major JavaScript engines, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Lua, etc., etc., etc., all use C++ or C. C, of course, is just a stripped-down version of C++ these days.

      The future has never looked brighter for C++. It's improving at an astounding pace. People are finally realizing that they were wasting their time using other languages.

      Maybe you're not smart enough to have realized this fact, but others have. While you're sitting there with your thumb up your ass, crying about how Parse or whatever SaaS nonsense you're dealing with just shut down, the rest of us are using C++ and running our software on our own hardware, getting real work done. You Rust users are panicking; we C++ users are busy accomplishing.

    7. Re:It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Lisandro · · Score: 1

      And it will likely remain that way 30 years from now.

      Prediction is hard, especially those about the future.

      Not really. It is simple - there's no alternative offering the same level of performance, support and established userbase. Those things aren't built over a weekend.

      Is the same reason C has stayed relevant for almost 50 years. Nothing else covered the "portable assembler" role as well.

    8. Re:It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Prediction is hard, especially those about the future.

      That is why all my predictions are about the past.

    9. Re: It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Calavar · · Score: 0

      Put your rabid fanboyism aside for a moment and actually use your brain: Rust fills a very different niche from C++. It is for writing safe code, whereas writing safe or secure C or C++ code damn near impossible.

      So within the next decade, you will find Rust popping up anywhere where you need high peformance with strong safety guarantees -- automobile and aviation electronics, high-frequency trading, medical devices, etc.

      On the other hand, using Rust for code that doesn't need to be especially safe is a fad because when you don't need safe code, Rust's safety features just get in the way.

      I'm also not sure why you think Ruby is a fad because it has

      • a well-written and feature-complete standard library
      • an ecosystem that doesn't revolve around doing switching to new-framework-of-the-week multiple times a year.
      • an ecosystem that isn't fragmented because code is written with a dozen different incompatible flavors (CoffeeScript, Babel, TypeScript, etc.)
    10. Re: It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It is for writing safe code, whereas writing safe or secure C or C++ code damn near impossible.

      What the fuck? Are you writing C++ code like it's 1987? You do know that the language has evolved, right? If you use RAII and modern C++ techniques, you can develop massive software systems without dealing with raw pointers even once, for example. You get the safety of Rust, but without the many downsides of Rust.

      Rust is a lot like Ada. It's all hype, and much less substance. Whatever small amount of safety you might get over C++ is totally outweighed by the problems that Rust and Ada have that C++ just doesn't have. Those who might benefit from using Rust or Ada will just do what they've always done, and use a safe subset of C++ instead.

      Everything you wrote about Ruby is wrong, too. The standard library is quite lacking. That's why you need to use so many goddamn Ruby gems in order to do anything remotely useful. And if you'd ever actually dealt with Ruby gems, you'd know how goddamn awful they are to work with, since the Ruby ecosystem is fragmented and total shit. Ruby on Rails alone changes so much between major releases that upgrades become a big disaster. Each major release of Ruby on Rails essentially is a new framework, they just all have the same name!

      You should be careful about using insults like "fanboy", too. Name-calling like that could put you in violation of the Rust Community Code of Conduct! The Rust Moderation Team could then come after you.

    11. Re: It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Gr8Apes · · Score: 0

      Ruby is a fad because it doesn't really offer anything new or compelling in the larger context of programming. It's slower, less secure, and less scalable than alternatives. That alone will kill it.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    12. Re: It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Calavar · · Score: 1

      People keep bringing up RAII as if it's some kind of panacea. It's a useful tool, but it is no panacea. Sure, you allocated an std::vector on the stack to take advantage of RAII, but if the memory allocation in the constructor fails, it will throw an exception. Are you handling that exception? Because I've literally never seen C++ code that handled std::bad_alloc exceptions.

      Do you do a push_back() operation later on? Because that can also throw an exception, and if you have a bunch of push_back() statements in a loop, and you get an std::bad_alloc exception halfway through, you are going to end up with a vector that is stuck in an intermediate state. How do you rollback the changes? RAII can't help you solve that problem.

      And compound this with the fact that your compiler can't even give you hints on what exceptions you need handle because basically no extant C++ code (including most of the standard library) comes with proper throw specifications. There is literally no way for you to know that you missed handling that std::bad_alloc exception until some bug rears its ugly face.

    13. Re: It is interesting that you mention Rust! by Calavar · · Score: 2

      And when it comes to Ruby having an anemic standard library, let's look at the libraries that are included with a vanilla install of Python versus a vanilla installation of Ruby:

      Decimal arithmetic:
      Python: decimal, Ruby: BigDecimal

      Templating:
      Python: string.Template, Ruby: ERB

      Logging:
      Python: logging, Ruby: Logger

      Compression:
      Python zipfile, Ruby: zlib

      Argument parsing:
      Python: argparse, Ruby: optparse

      XML:
      Python: xml, Ruby: REXML

      Encryption:
      Python: crypt, Ruby: openssl

      Again, all these modules are included out of the box. No RubyGems required.

  7. React by jomama717 · · Score: 0

    I was forced (by a "hip" development director) to try and implement a simple small web application using Facebook's "React" javascript library, and after toiling for three days with it I decided that the only thing you can easily implement with React is something that looks and acts just like Facebook, not surprisingly. I abandoned it and created the site framework-less in four hours. I have no idea what "Parse" is, but I am very wary of these corporate frameworks/APIs/languages since that experience.

    Go look at some "hip" github projects out there, it's ridiculous - there are literally 10's of thousands of lines of framework supporting these tiny little applications, it's absurd. There are even massive projects out there to make integration between two frameworks "easier", which themselves rely on any number of other unrelated frameworks. Where does it all end??

    --
    while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
    1. Re: React by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It ends when the hipsters are kicked out of the industry. They've ruined everything they've touched. They ruin UIs that were good. They create awful frameworks. They prefer to use the absolute worst programming languages, like JavaScript, for everything. They took git and centralized it on GitHub. They're too lazy and/or dumb to learn SQL, so they use persistent hashtables for storing data, and query it using imperative JavaScript code. It's nothing but idiocy and disaster when it comes to these people. It doesn't matter if it's an 18 year old hipster or a 30 year old hipster or a 55 year old hipster. They all need to find a different occupation.

    2. Re: React by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hopefully they'll be ejected when the current tech bubble bursts and they can go DIAF.

    3. Re: React by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the upcoming bubble burst is anything like the last one, I'll be very busy fixing up the many messes that these hipsters, relieved of their positions, have left around! It's lucrative, but it's also unfortunate that so much time, effort and money was wasted on these hipsters and their disasters. These software systems could have been built properly in thr first place, using the correct technologies.

    4. Re: React by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why pay them six figures to do it during the bubble if they can get you to do it for five figures after the bubble?

    5. Re:React by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is React really that bad? If you go to hacker news there's nothing but posts about this built with react and that built with react on and on and all the discussion is filled with praise on how React is the greatest thing to ever happen to buildling web UI. Of course thats what we heard with Angular until its team came out with Angular 2.0 which was a massive failure to its community of users, eventually leading to their demise. I ask because I cant bother to learn another bloated "this way, not that way" bizarro set of abstractions when everyone today seems terrified to simply write in pure plain old javascript, plain css3 and simple html.

    6. Re:React by rasmusbr · · Score: 2

      Parse is/was a service that allowed people who knew next to nothing about server programming to cobble together a backend for a mobile app (or other app that can make http requests).

      So in other words it was a tremendously useful or harmful service depending on your level of cynicism. It is of course hard to monetise a solution like this, since any app that becomes highly profitable will attract developers that know how to build a proper backend and then that app will migrate away and stop paying monthly fees.

    7. Re:React by jomama717 · · Score: 1

      It's not so bad as long as you stay close to the intent, where you want to do something like facebook, or a blog, with frequently added/updated items and comments and such. So if you're writing a little half-assed blog type thing it would be pretty easy to make it "reactive" to people adding new posts and comments and things. But try and apply it to something like what I was tasked with, which was a little search/modify/create/delete thing it was a complete disaster. YMMV

      --
      while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
    8. Re: React by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wouldn't even say they create awful frameworks. They steal the bad bits of traditional UIs and call it their framework. They simplify any complexity out of computing UNTIL the very concept of the feature becomes inherently useless. A classic example of hipster in charge of an eCommerce site. Minimalist design, very easy to use checkout facility. No payment gateway because it might spit an error and ruin the user experiences and then hire someone to manually process the credit cards.

        "All hail me I have a degree I'm wearing Globes and ripped jeans and I know better" NOT!

      So yeah. The fad is dying but its a slow dying fad which is being exploited in its decline. Until the respected blend between functional and hipster happens and are treated equally its going to take a few more colossal fuckups but I'm hopeful out for them :) I'm in no way pessimistic that Hipster and Hipster Drum Circles, I mean Design houses, get the shaft from the industry.

    9. Re: React by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Found the out-of-touch neckbeard!

  8. Shuttering by zifn4b · · Score: 1

    Person: Who are you sir?
    Shutterer: I am the shutterer
    Person: What do you do?
    Shutterer: I shutter

    --
    We'll make great pets
  9. So wrong... by jopsen · · Score: 1

    Rust is a product of Mozilla, which as we know has had some tough times lately. They lost their Google sponsorship, and have had to settle for Yahoo instead.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong... Moziila chose Yahoo over Google, presumably the deal was better. And looking at it form the standpoint of the Mozilla mission it might just enable more competition on the search market.

    Rather, I think it's a Mozilla project with source code that's publicly available.

    Nope, even the Mozilla people working on this is very attentive to make sure they aren't tried too much to Mozilla infrastructure.
    So I wouldn't worry about this.

    My only concern with rust is that it's too complicated and encourages too much over-engineering.. Maybe I just haven't really gotten good at writing it yet. But that is definitely my major concern.

  10. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it by AndruByrne6709 · · Score: 1

    Parse is hugely useful as a way to "assume" a back end. Any good NoSQL database does most of the association work during the write task; in this case on mobile client. With a few housekeeping tasks running on the parse server you can actually make a clean, fast, scalable service but obviously it's also great for prototyping. I think Facebook dropped Parse because they are not one of the big four making $$ in the cloud and Parse is a SaaS; it runs great on Google cloud.

    1. Re:Don't knock it if you haven't tried it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People like you irritate me. First off its a tool that at least a dozen companies provide. Second, don't blame the tools blame the technician

      Any good NoSQL database does most of the association work during the write task;

      That's right I'm looking at the problem, that's you not the tech. Comparing a little cloud VPS that hosts a single system is dopey when you consider the raw hardware a SaaS cloud firm like Parse offers.

      Last but not least SaaS databasing destroys your companies asset value if you're an App developer. In short you're simply giving the very value of your company to the likes of FaceBook. You'd have to be next to mentally retarded (as as expert) to even do this in the first place.

  11. What do you call it when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What do you call it when the first time you hear about a project is the shut-down announcement? Also, does nobody consider how difficult it is to search for information on their project? If you google "parse" you're going to get a lot of CS tutorials and papers about parsing, as well you should.

  12. Facebook Is Shuttering the Parse Dev Platform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And nothing of value was lost.