[technogarden]

I've been using Parse for a month or so and I've been really impressed by how powerful the platform is, and the rate at which they are adding features and libraries. I also have to say they have some great customer service and take bug reports and feature requests seriously and professionally. I have yet to deploy with them, so I can't speak about performance or scalability, but if anyone is interested I could document my journey. Kudos to the Parse team!

[tl]

I'm impressed that your account is a whole 5 minutes older than your post. I'd be even more impressed if Parse was open source instead of yet another walled-garden PaaS hyped by shills.

[markerdmann]

I've been following Parse for a while now, and I agree with technogarden. Their platform is impressive, and they're adding useful new features at a rapid rate.

It would definitely be cool if they open-sourced the platform, but, in the meantime, you might be interested in this project:

http://code.google.com/p/openmobster/wiki/learnmore

Personally, though, I don't mind paying for a service like Parse. If someone is willing to not only build the features I need but also to wear a pager and get up at 3am just to keep my users happy, I'm more than happy to give them some of my money.

[plasma]

Same here, happy to give money to make a pain point go away so I can focus on the product itself.

My only wish was that I could place an easy API layer between Parse and my app, because I would want more fine grained control over how data is mutated (even with ACLs, someone with write permission could mutate data and corrupt it if desired).

There's a REST API, but I don't think I would want to use that as much.

[adelevie]

Check out Weary (https://github.com/mwunsch/weary/wiki). It's a framework for building REST clients in Ruby. Clients written with Weary are also Rack apps which can can be mounted in a Rails app, for example. Then you can add your own layer of authentication/whatever to the Rails app which will act as a proxy to your Parse db.

[adelevie]

Not only is your comment incredibly rude to some really nice folks, but it's also wrong.

Here's some data I exported from one of my Parse accounts: https://gist.github.com/2475461.

[Gorbzel]

It might be rude, but he's not wrong.

Deploying APIs in the cloud for primary use in mobile apps is an oft-repeated/able task, and it doesn't seem like there's anywhere near enough value in the Parse API on top of what you get from the native SDKs and a solid combination of open source stack software supported by an enterprise track record more promising than a Series A round a few months ago.

Also, as the comments here suggest, there are a lot of slight modifications to the default use case that reward having solidly built a stack not built on yet high-level PaaS abstraction. Sorry, but a JSON representation of your data is the low bar, not some instant proof that the product is magic.

[benologist]

Parse isn't a high level abstraction, they just like to make certain things more convenient, if you want you can just use them as a database with a rest api over it.

In terms of value ... I'm really not sure how you lose - if your app is a flop you're going to coast along on the free plan, if it's a success you can focus on your app rather than your stack, and you can migrate away from them when you feel like it.

[hobonumber1]

Not everything needs to be open-source. Its a good product and they deserve to charge for it.

[jmathai]

Not everything that charges money needs to be close-source.

I'm not advocating Parse open source anthing, it's entirely up to them but open source does not mean $0.