
Helios - olivercameron
http://helios.io
======
prezjordan
I swear, Mattt must code for 40 hours a day. The sheer quantity (and quality!)
of his ships is mind-boggling.

This looks fantastic, I'll definitely be checking this out!

~~~
Gertig
After reading the first two paragraphs I thought that this has to be mattt!
The man is a machine.

~~~
marcomonteiro
Same. I think I've read every post in NSHipster at least twice.

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degenerate
Helios is also the moniker of a very "cloud-like" (ambient) composer named
Keith Kenniff. His music is excellent for coding when you need that superior
downtempo thinking background noise.

My favorite album: <https://soundcloud.com/_type/sets/helios-eingya>

His soundcloud: <https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff>

~~~
publicfig
While we're discussing him, it's worth checking out another project of his,
Goldmund. It's piano centric music that really embraces the minimalist aspects
of some of the newer neo-classical artists (think Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter,
Nils Frahm or Dustin O'Halloran).

A lot of the music is on Spotify, and here's a link to a set of it on
Soundcloud: <https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff/sets/goldmund>

~~~
usmanity
I had no idea Helios is also Goldmund. The sound is so different. I found them
both on Spotify.

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obilgic
This is basically a combination of these four gems:

    
    
        https://github.com/mattt/rack-in-app-purchase
        https://github.com/mattt/rack-core-data
        https://github.com/mattt/rack-passbook
        https://github.com/mattt/rack-push-notification
    

That is why codebase looks very clean and simple.

~~~
scoot
That amounts to saying mattt is a machine because mattt is a machine. Building
on the shoulders of... himself!

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MrUnderhill
Off topic: The ultra light custom fonts a lot of websites use nowadays (looks
like "Bariol" on this site), do they look bad to anyone other than me? Both in
Firefox and Opera (Linux) many of the lines are invisible or barely visible
(example: <http://i.imgur.com/Yk0Q83G.png> ). In Chrome they look a little bit
better.

~~~
nekopa
On my iPad all the letter 'D's have disappeared. It's quite disconcerting.

~~~
evolve2k
Same on my iPhone, all the 'd' characters don't show up properly at all. Had
to read the article zoomed right up so that the spider thin d characters were
visible at all. Please change the font.

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nathan_long
I'm impressed that the name includes the substring "iOS".

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andrewljohnson
Neat, I already use mattt's CLI tool for interfacing with the Apple dev site:
<https://github.com/mattt/cupertino>

~~~
myko
Wow, this is amazing! My least favorite part of iOS dev is visiting the
horrendous dev portal. Thanks for the link.

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ryderm
I havn't done enough iOS to really speak intelligently about it, but this
looks like a great place to start without limiting flexibility.

Although "an extensible open-source mobile backend framework" seems to say
that it also applies to non iOS, it doesn't seem that it does. Is it more
suited for iOS, or iOS only?

~~~
dirtyaura
Many services that Helios provides are either iOS specific backend
integrations (Push Notifications & Store Kit transaction verifications) or has
client-side components (A/B testing, better client-side networking libraries)

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pasbesoin
Just FYI, Helios Software Solutions in England is the maker of the
longstanding and widely distributed TextPad text editor for Windows. In case
this would present a potential name conflict. (I don't know -- just
mentioning.)

<http://www.textpad.com/>

<http://www.textpad.com/contact/index.html>

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
I don't get the impression that these projects are at risk of being mentioned
in the same scope.

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bdotdub
This looks awesome - a Parse.com you can deploy yourself!

~~~
kiernan
Also check this one out then, similar but with no mobile client SDK (other
than a javascript): <http://deployd.com>

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saddino
I've been thinking that Parse (and StackMob, Kinvey et al) need to provide a
similar self-deployable solution at a reasonable price; this might be the
motivation they need to do so.

~~~
tenfourty
This might cannibalise their business model in such an undeveloped market,
they are all about lock in currently. There is definitely space in the market
for an open source based MBaaS/BaaS that allows you to roll your own or use
their hosted version.

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neya
Wow, Thank you SO MUCH!

Admittedly, this is one of the best things that ever happened to open source
w.r.t mobile development in the last few months!

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parrots
I've been debating using something like Parse or Azure as a backend, and this
looks like a nice alternative as I'm usually a roll-your-own-solution kinda
guy.

But I worry about how it would hold up in terms of performance, given this
recent benchmarking fest featured on HN.
[http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/framework-
benchma...](http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/framework-benchmarks/)

~~~
lgleason
It depends on the number of transactions you are likely to see on your system.
I love ruby, but there are areas where it begins to fall down.

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Gertig
Really looking forward to trying this out, owning your data definitely goes a
long way.

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m2mapps
This is really great.

A massive limitation of Parse.com is with their Javascript SDK - you have to
expose your app keys to the client and the SDK doesn't work at all on any
version of IE unless you have SSL enabled.

~~~
adelevie
1) There are Access Control Lists which should help with that. Also, note that
Parse gives you a Javascript key which is separate from your master key.
Though I'm a longtime Parse user, I have not spent much time with the JS SDK
on the client (as opposed to Cloud Code, where no keys are exposed), so I
can't really say that this just "solves the problem."

2) Wouldn't any similarly-situated Javascript library face the same problems,
with Access Control Lists probably being the most practical solution?

3) Moreover, with any mobile backend, you must assume that the keys that ship
within the code of your native app will be public. So you should be using
Access Control Lists if you're using the iOS SDK, for example.

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coob
I've recently been working on a Node backend for IAP verification and
providing signed S3 URLs for downloadable content - something like this would
have halved the time it took. Good work Matt!

~~~
julien_c
Interesting – I'm thinking about implementing something just like that right
now. Did you find good resources about this?

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mtp0101
Why would they name their application Helios? It collides with Eclipse.

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keeran
Good to see some potential (and OSS!) competition for Parse :)

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juanbyrge
NICE!!! So much better than parse

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dracoli
This is really nice. Huge time saver for apps that only need a basic backend
for certain functionalities.

Can this potentially also work for other mobile platforms?

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lgleason
It is a great start. The passbook implementation looks to be basic right now.
I would love to be able to combine this with
<https://github.com/frozon/passbook> for passbook support and
git@github.com:grocer/grocer.git for push notifications.

The code would have better test coverage and more people to support the
project.

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troels
Not to rain on the parade, but I just got started with ios and I gave up on
getting AFIncrementalStore to work properly. RestKit looks much more solid to
me. Can any actual ios developers (e.g. someone with more than 14 days of
experience) comment on that?

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miles_matthias
It's really awesome to see Heroku getting into the mobile BaaS industry. I
think they have a lot of expertise that they can lend and I'm even more
excited that the project is open source, free, and deployable. Looking forward
to using this!

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maximegarcia
Saw Mattt and his Helios project at Paris.rb meetup yesterday evening. Quite
interesting :)

I wondered in the subway while coming back home if Helios helps to sync
backend-made changes to the app through push notifications, in an
automagically fashion.

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attheodo
Mobile backends is definitely a hot topic nowadays and this is one of the
greatest contributions. A small part of me wishes it was a more "Pythonic"
though.. :)

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iandanforth
This looks wonderful, thanks for all the hard work! I hope this expands to
encompass other platforms and languages.

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namuol
Does this specifically cater to iOS or can it act as a more general-purpose
backend service like Parse.com?

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healthenclave
Guyz Do we have something similar for Django ? Or maybe a template of pre-
written code for Tastypie ??

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mchristoff
android support coming?

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Kiro
How do they put the rocket in the title like that?

~~~
Aqua_Geek
It's a Unicode character (U+1F680).

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tamersalama
Can't wait to integrated clients with RubyMotion

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lennydizzy
Is there any similar product for Clojure?

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known
Brilliant

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morefranco
Beautiful.

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wenfeixiang
good job, i want to try it

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lnanek2
Wow, iOS only when Android is 75% shipping smartphones?

~~~
phil
You should totally submit a pull request adding Android support!

