All heads down and voices lower – popular mobile development platform Parse was announced dead without any possibilities to revive. In other words Parse shut down. On January 28th (2016) the IT society was shocked and surprised as nothing was going wrong till that day. Only the laziest and those in coma haven’t been writing about that happening trying to find the answers for this decision and planning the work after it.
The only question after that news was simple “What should we do next?”. Parse gives a year for its users to save the data as all the servers keeping them will be wiped then.All heads down and voices lower – popular mobile development platform Parse was announced dead without any possibilities to revive.
Parse shut downWhat is Parse.com?
For those who don’t get the whole panic here is the small overview of Parse system.
Parse is also known as MbaaS platform – Mobile Backend as a Service. It means the great opportunity to get the backend options for your mobile application done in a well-shaped template. It has nice working options for analytics, push-notifications, hooks and so on.
Developers can easily concentrate on the app development as Parse is dealing with the backend resources. This platform surely stands as the cheap and reliable service.
In 2013 Facebook bought Parse services that seemed as the great step for the last to be developed and filled with more and more possibilities. But three years later happened what had happened. With no explanations and apparent reasons the service is announced shut and dead. Quite strange doing as Parse was truly a finding for dozens of companies and freelance developers.
But as we cannot influence Facebook decision we must understand that the life goes on and the work should not be stopped because of somebody’s ambitions.
What to do now?
That’s why we have to focus on all possible ways to keep the applications safe and sound. Here we can name 4 options how to take Parse based apps to another state which keeps them working.
Migrate to other BaaS
The first of it concerns the willing of Parse itself to help the developers to get through. They suggest migrating all the data to another BaaS platform (e.g. Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure etc.) as they have quite a similar structure you may see just a slight difference in this migration. But it also has its pros and cons. You will be able to keep the application data safe and working but without any possibility to add any of new features to it. This variant can be a solution but only for a restricted period. Also there is a pessimistic point of view: if such a promising platform as Parse was shut down how can we rely on any of other services which can be stopped in any moment as well?
Run your own MongoDB
If it is not an option for you there is a second way to save the application data in the primary state without rewriting it. The developers are suggested to get their own Parse server clone as the Parse community had introduced the guide in GitHub repo. It means that developers are free to use the source to migrate the data to MongoDB and start it in similar environment. The only points to be careful with concern working with Node.js to get the server started it may take some time to get familiar with it. And also the important fact that not all of Parse functionalities will be supported on its clones. If you develop an application that uses only the simple features it will be a great possibility, but the searching continues if you do not.
Parse-like services
Here we can suggest the third option which is not an independent possibility but only a way to ease the loss. In the great community of Parse users there is a list of Parse services analogues that became popular as there appeared such a need.
It may help the developers to replace some of the features with another especially if the application is a small of light one and used just a couple of Parse features. Here we can easily recognize Google Analytics for analytic option; it is recommended to look for Firebase, OneSignal or Pushwoosh for push notifications and so on. Really the list of analogues is really big and includes the options for all the application platforms: Windows, Linus, Mac, IPhone, Android and all the rest you need. So if the problem stands only for a couple of features you need to transform, there is a solution made and gathered by the rest of users in the world.
But what to do if the options above do not fit the demand or if we do not rely on the suggested solutions as they can also fall down like the card house some day?
Your custom backend
The last but not the least variant is to get your backend fully rewritten and started on the developers own servers.
Yes, it will be hard and time costing to rewrite all the data. But the developers and the applications become truly safe from the wills of another people and it is possible to change any features as you wish, when you wish and in that amount that you think it is needed. The time and efforts are the only things that developers may spend. But the result proves it is worth doing. The whole world of tools, methods, programming languages and databases are open for the creator and most of them are even free of use. What can be better that mixing all the things you like and consider as interesting and important into a product that will find its users and fans.
As for our company we can sure all the users and clients that we came up to this need with all the eagerness to prove our ability to create applications by our hands. Using the ready platforms can save time and efforts but the product made by the developer himself stands as truly a masterpiece and may induce somebody to the similar work one day.
So what is the best way?
As a conclusion we can say that nothing ended with Parse shut down. IT sphere always was a fast flowing world where some things became replaced b another. It is always a shock if the things you were relying on become a yesterday mirage but the new day always brings better ideas. We should only get them in and be ready to develop not only the application but the points of our view.
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