

What do you think of services like Parse and Treeline? - mhsivitz

As a designer&#x2F;frontend dev I find these backend builders really intriguing.<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;treeline.io , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;parse.com<p>I&#x27;m curious what the dev&#x2F;engineering community thinks bout them. Have you used them? Are they only good for quick product hacks or could they scale over time?
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jonsterling
I don't know about treeline. At a previous company, we committed early on to
using Parse and it was a disaster for us. Most of our problems as a company
were not technical of course, but pretty much all our serious technical
problems can be traced to us locking ourselves into using Parse, when it would
have been 1000x easier to just put a server of our own making on Heroku and
run a postgres database.

Our userbase was TINY (so you think scaling should not even remotely be an
issue), but we had constant downtime with Parse; not to mention we observed
between 1% and 3% of all requests to Parse failing for obscure reasons (and it
was never clear if it was just our node, or if it was global). I seem to
recall the Parse team fixing these, and then repeatedly rolling back their
fixes since they would inevitably cause something even more catastrophic to
happen. I am sure all of them were working really hard, and I don't want to
say anything to make them feel bad, but honestly, the class of problems that
plagued Parse (at least at the time I was familiar with it) did not inspire
confidence. It is possible that it is much better now; I have not used it in
months.

Parse is a lot of fun for quick prototypes and demos, and I recommend it for
that if you find yourself wanting to iterate quickly and repeatedly on such
things, particularly if most of your "innovation" is happening on a client
(like an iOS or Android app, etc.).

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jonsterling
(to be clear, when I said "I don't know about treeline", I was not expressing
doubt; I just mean I have never looked at it.)

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Nilef
Absolutely love Treeline. Alongside Webflow, you can pretty much make a full
web application without barely touching code. It's super easy to make your own
"machinepacks" for Treeline too (Here's one I whipped up to work with
Firebase: [https://github.com/NileFrater/machinepack-
firebase](https://github.com/NileFrater/machinepack-firebase)) - It's hard to
go far wrong with Treeline because 1) Every line of code knows exactly what to
do if it either succeeds or errors out, preventing "snowballing" and 2) It
spits out clean code you can get stuck straight into without having to
understand random libraries or new ways of working. In short, Treeline is like
Webflow for the back-end.

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loumf
I've used Parse and would do so again -- I also use other stuff. They are
excellent for getting up quickly and "it depends" on whether they are ok for
scaling. Personally, I worry about fixing that when/if it happens.

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mhsivitz
Yea I've used Parse before and loved it. I really like that Treeline will
allow you to easily setup API routes too.

I've been assuming the scaling is taken care of by these companies but I could
be wrong. I guess the price would be my number one concern at scale.

~~~
loumf
Yes -- cost is pretty much the main concern at scale. The best thing to do is
to have a revenue model that makes you not have to care about that.

Then, if it make sense at some point to try to reduce that cost, you can
replace it.

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Faither
Parse is worth your seriously consideration.

