Hello everyone and welcome I'm Alex i'm the main architect for back4App.com and today i'm here to talk a little bit about Parse.
For those of you who don't know Parse yet, Parse is a backend as a service platform and it was created back in 2011. In 2013 it was bought by facebook but in mid 2017 facebook decided to open source the solutions which the community embraced and took it to the product that that we have today.
Parse delivers multi-language, multi-platform sdks that allows you to easily and producing very little code to store data on the cloud , manage users, send push notifications and even run cloud functions which is the source code that runs on server side.
The website parseplatform.org is the main page of its open source project and in here you'll find a get started which will lead to the part server guide. It's a very detailed guide explaining how it works and how to do the basic stuff on the server side of the application.
We also have the community forum where you can ask questions, stack overflow, tags so you can also find some documentation and help you in there if you need.
Here we have the parse dashboard which will bring up this visual interface of Parse and it makes so much easier to deal with your
classes and your objects because Parse itself is a just a piece of software that runs internal so if you want to have to have a graphical interface for it you should definitely use the Parse Dashboard.
The Parse Server project it will open up on in Github and a lot of people ask me is Parse dead after facebook released it? No it's not,
it's alive and well and as you can see we have this huge community
that embraced the project and is always fixing issues and bugs and amazing new features so it's very updated is very secure it's very reliable and stable
It's a very very competitive platform if you're developing your software because it allows you to reduce the amount of code generated to achieve the very common functionalities. The idea behind Parse is that you focus your efforts on the parts that bring most value to your application so usually this is the front end.
Front end is the part where the user is going to interact with your software and he does not want to know how you're storing data or how you're dealing with your code. The user is only concerned that it's made in a secure way and in an efficient way and Parse delivers that.
We have internal statistics here at Back4App that says that people coming from other frameworks and adopting Parse can reduce the number of lines generated for a project up to 30%. So producing thirty percent less code uh means you have thirty percent faster time to mass market and thirty percent less code to maintain over time. This is quite a huge impact on how you develop your software.
Back here on the Parse website - platform.org - you also find the
Parse Server guide is how the documentation on how to use the server side of ours and here you have all the sdks that are officially supported so for instance if you are delivering an ios application or android application or web application.
Here you have the guides for those so if you open this it will guide you with examples through all the features that a basic user of Parse should be. A section to learn how to store objects, how to query for objects, how to change and save the objects, how to deal with sessions and users and how to run a cloud code, how to send push notifications.
This is very detailed and you have pieces of software so for instance if you're working with ios and os x you will find codes called examples both in objective c which is the older language and swift that you can just copy and paste into your application and it will just work so the whole idea of these guides are to be very easy to understand and very very easy to follow to achieve the functionalities that you want.
We also have the android sdk which is very very popular. If you open this it will change the color telling that you're in another guide and here as well you'll find all the documentation that that you can
possibly need to basically operate parse save objects query for objects so just click here on the uh on the topic that interests you
and you will find here code that you can just copy and paste in your project and it will just work for basic functionalities.
If you need to go advance you can always rely on our slack channel for the community which the link will be in the description for
this video so just click there and remember to to join because we have lots of users in there that uh are always prone to help you from the very basic to the most advanced questions that you can possibly have and i myself am there all the time answering questions so if you have any join our group and let me know i'll be glad to help.
We also have a javascript guide here that will show you how to deal with javascript which is the most common language around programming language around the world so you can just use this even on uh node.js projects and other javascript projects.
It will just work dotnet with xamarin also works if you're developing a game using unity we also have a guide and a sdk for that php is also very popular so i invite you to come to this website parsplatform.org and check the documentation on the language that you choose to work with.
If you do not find the language that we are working with we also have the rest api uh and GraphQL guides where we will guide you on how to use those technologies from practically any programming language that supports those so that's pretty much what i have for
today.
We'll have more videos coming soon explaining deeper and in more detail how to use and how to achieve functionalities if you have any questions or any suggestions to these videos please join the community slack channel.
Again the link for that will be in the description for this video and hope to see you there see you soon.
Happy Coding
Top comments (3)
I have used Parse for my 2 development projects, and I love its open-source community. Yes, it is easy to get a variety of available resources to support your project here. However, before start using this platform, I was much confused, and this article assisted me in exploring everything about Parse. If I share the core pros, cons and features according to my experience, then they would be the following:
Data modelling, push, and real-time notifications are the core features that you would love to use them.
Similarly, as compared to custom backend development, it would accelerate the development speed.
It is easy to focus on the core product with Parse.
On the contrary, there are also some limitations. Indeed, it doesn't work for Postgrees and MongoDB databases.
I've got a mobile app currently plugged into the Sashido Parse hosted backend. I have to say Sashido are very good, reasonable pricing and great uptime (never had an outage yet). Highly recommend.
We used Parse at a start-up I was at and personally I was not a fan the way we used it.
Javascript to control the back-end from the front is a bit anti-thetial to separation of concerns. Then we use PHP and Parse on the PHP files where front-end and back-end were co-mingled together. We just ended up writing the same PHP parse over and over again. Then Parse has their own API end points. But I don't want to use there end points, the company needs to make their own. Overall, this felt very 2013. BUT perhaps it is possible to use Parse with a company's own API's, though I wasn't exposed to that way.