

Ask HN: What is Parse? - zuck9

This is a very noobish question, sorry about that. I&#x27;ve spent the last several minutes trying to understand what Parse.com is but I still don&#x27;t get it. What does Parse Cloud do? Does it take care of all my database needs? (Replacement for MySQL?)
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6thSigma
Parse is a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS). A BaaS is a great solution to connect
your app to a backend server without having to build the backend yourself.

Why would you want your app to connect to a backend? Without a backend, you
can only store data from a user in a database on their local device; which
means that data is only available on that device.

If you need to do a login system, any kind of social interaction (sharing data
between users), a leaderboard, syncing data across devices, etc. - you will
need a backend. Parse helps you with that by providing you APIs to do all of
those things.

I'm actually building an open source BaaS. Email me if you have any more
questions.

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josephschmoe
It's a cloud database. If you know a lot about front end and don't want to do
any work for your back end, it's perfect.

Just enter your data types as objects in the GUI and you're good to go.
There's JavaScript too if you absolutely need it.

I've used it and it definitely made my life a lot easier as a mobile developer
with little back end experience.

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WoodenChair
Parse is effectively a very easy to use NoSQL database in the cloud. It has
many more features than that, but that's the core of it.

