Back to the Mac: Parse Adds OS X Support (opens in new tab)

According to their meta description tag, "Parse is a complete technology stack to power your mobile app's backend."

According to their SDK Introduction, "The Parse platform provides a complete backend solution for your mobile application. Our goal is to totally eliminate the need for writing server code or maintaining servers. If you're familiar with web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, we've taken many of the same principles and applied them to our platform. In particular, our SDK is ready to use out of the box with minimal configuration on your part."

Skim the API docs -- that's what got me to actually understand Parse.

It's an extremely full-featured, full-stack platform. Think a less-general Heroku. The API makes it look kind of like MongoDB + blob storage + push notifications, but with really nice abstractions for things like account management.

It also has a "Cloud Code" feature that can store and execute custom JavaScript server-side on their end.

On iOS I'm using it to log errors and usage info (how often different features are used). I'm only sending/storing simple JSON which I can pull out later as required with simple scripts.

I'm not using it for anything that I couldn't write a server for but it would have been a couple of days for me to set it up securely and it comes with libraries with useful fuctions like sendEventually which will save the update to send later if it can't connect straight away (again saving me time).

Parse has more advanced features like user registration that I'm not using (I don't need them at the moment but I'm also nervous to get myself locked in too deeply). It also offers a mechanism that takes some of the work out do implementing push messages. I might investigate the push mechanisms yet.

I think it makes sense to speed up implementation where you want features not supported by iCloud such as cross platform support or to share content between users.

The sense I get is more or less that they're providing push/storage capabilities similar to what Apple provides via iCloud. The critical differences are that:

- It's cross-platform. You can use it for Android / Windows / Linux / web apps, not just iOS and OS X apps.

- It doesn't have some of the restrictions that iCloud does (e.g, App Store distribution for Mac OS X apps).

They also add some extra functionality on top of built-in OS functionality -- for instance, they've got some utilities for simplifying in-app purchases on iOS / OS X.

Glad I'm not the only one scratching my head on just WHAT Parse actually is.

The way their website seems go out of its way to NOT tell you what it is made me wonder if it's some convoluted Flash-to-ObjC doodad (or some other, similarily 'unpopular' way of doing things). At least they have a healthy ratio of cloud icons, pricing links and testimonials on the site...? ;)

They offer BaaS and for many apps can remove the need to setup, configure and administrate any form of backend. I'm not sure about OSX, but they've written a bunch of convenience methods for iOS and Android that are fantastic for rapidly iterating early versions of software.

I'm sure the reasoning is that the vagueness gets people talkin'.

I use Parse for several high-usage apps, both iOS and web apps, and have never had a problem. I log every single connection error to analytics, and see very few problems.

> they need to improve their stability and offer better uptime

What's their track record here?

You can use the JavaScript SDK[1] to build a webapp companion quite easily. This is how we implemented the mobile webapp version of our Anypic app[2].

Parse also has a REST API[3] which can be used from your web application backend of choice.

[1]: https://parse.com/docs/js_guide [2]: https://anypic.org [3]: https://parse.com/docs/rest

Fixed - the OS X guide is actually combined with the iOS guide. Try again, from the link at https://parse.com/apps/quickstart#osx/blank !