

Parse, Firebase and the comeback of Two-Tier - ksat
http://ksat.me/comeback-of-thick-clients/

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hkarthik
Having done my time in "two tier" stacks, I would argue the biggest
disadvantage they bring is challenges with testing. This could be unit,
integration, or just manual acceptance testing.

Having to spin up a separate environment or mock EVERYTHING leads to testing
friction which in turn leads to testing simply not being done. If you stop
testing, it's hard to maintain a consistent level of quality with your
software, especially as it grows and you bring on new developers.

That being said, I appreciate the turn-key ease of use with services like
Parse. If they solve the local development/multi environment issue for
testing, I'd be more apt to use something like it and avoid the administrative
headache of maintaining a backend infrastructure.

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shykes
"forget server code" comes at a price: tying yourself to a 3d-party
proprietary user database for security. That will be an acceptable tradeoff
only for some developers... but not the kind with a lot of money to spend. As
they start worrying about revenue I predict that the Parse and Firebase of the
world will have no choice but to allow execution of arbitrary server-side
validation... so much for "forget server code".

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Void_
And Meteor and Simperium.

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DanielShir
`Now, Since old is the new new...`

I remember one of the old timers at my former company saying the exact same
thing. Something along the lines that Facebook is the new Usenet.

