[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.