As declared in a recent blog post entitled: Moving On by Parse, it will be shutting down activity precisely on January 28, 2017. With Parse shutting doors, its present customers will have to migrate their mobile applications to some other player in the SaaS, that is, Software as a Service industry, not any later than January 27th, 2017. This inevitably puts an ample amount of pressure on mobile development organizations to think through their present backend strategies and determine how they will deploy their mobile apps in today’s cloud centric environment.
What is Parse?
For readers who need a brief introduction of what is Parse exactly is: Parse is a Mobile Backend as a Service MBaaS or BaaS. Parse enables web and mobile apps developers to connect their apps to back-end cloud databases by creating API (application program interface) endpoints that implemented customized business logic to act on the user or client data being stored or retrieved. Additionally, Parse provided elementary features such as user management, network interfacing, push notifications, social networking integrations, and other basic essentials for mobile apps development.
Timeline of Parse:
Parse first came to known in 2011 and grew quickly soon to be used by over tens of thousands of mobile application developers. In 2013, Parse was acquired by Facebook for 85 million dollars, which then went on to power a stated 500,000 applications. In 2016, with the close down of Parse put on the 2017 cards, the plug on the back-bone of many mobile developer apps can be said to be pulled off temporarily.
What can you do now that Parse is destined to a thing of the past?
Parse being such a set part of a mobile apps developer’s life, after its shutdown, it is impending that these developers will now have to look towards alternative horizons. Other larger companies like Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), IBM (Bluemix) and medium scaled companies like Kinvey and AnyPresence, offer similar services. These companies can serve as alternatives to hosting your existing Parse Server or a new MBaaS/BaaS offering in totality.
But when you look at facts and figures Parse has attracted more mobile app developers than the other existing platforms because of its user friendly and descriptive SDKs, competitive pricing, intuitive backend portals, and its innate ability to give complete solutions which would include cloud computing, push notifications and services, user authentication services, etc., that too with very little configuration procedure or setup. Therefore, Parse became the obvious choice to accelerate production of small scale apps to medium scale apps. To add Parse also brought specific features of large-scale apps.
Therefore, it is essential to you make the choice right is you do decide to migrate after all. To migrate your apps, you need to begin working on it as soon as possible. For most mobile apps, the migration process is consequential, and thus will require some dedicated development time and tedious work-cycle development plan.
For the time being you could use the Open Source framework Parse has made available called the Parse Server. The Parse Server is the Node.JS application based upon the core Express framework of Parse. This represents a part of the Parse service that allows customers to build and expose mobile APIs, develop business logic, and also connect to a back end data store or database. If your entire app back end was built on Parse, luckily it has provided a proper Migration Guide for their newly released, open-sourced Parse server.
What next?
It is true that Parse shutting down has affected development companies in a major way causing inconvenience and extra overhead expenses. But, if you actually think, this situation hasn’t actually pulled up an irrevocable havoc. It has gone on to show you that every most basic thing about app development can change in an instant. So it best to be prepared and future-proofing your current application infrastructure can actually be a good idea.
How would you do that?
If you are having a company develop your codes or back end for you, make it a point to have full access to the entire source code library. That would not just mean the client-side SDKs, but also the entire backend server, and the backend-server administrative console. So, that even if the vendor chooses to shutdown tomorrow, you have access to the apps entire source code and you can rebuild on that. In this way, you don’t have to be worried about even Google shutting down tomorrow (not that it will ever).
You could also build your very own Backend Solution
SaaS or BaaS platforms are great for MVPs and personal projects. If you want to build your own app, you need to be built it to scale, which meets present needs and also continues to evolve with time or customized needs. For this, the best business strategy would be to build your own backend. This way you can maintain complete control and can leverage this development as a great competitive advantage.
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