

Parse, The ‘Heroku For Mobile’, Raises $5.5 Million Series A - llambda
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/parse-the-heroku-for-mobile-raises-5-5-million-series-a/

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kennystone
Parse is different from Heroku is a very big way - vendor lock-in. You are
using the Parse libraries, DB, push notifications, etc, and replacing that
will be quite difficult. Heroku, on the other hand, is usually just a generic
Rails stack (or java or clojure), which is easily moved.

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scotth
The client API requires that you provide it your app's global credentials.
These are likely to be baked right into the code, so can be easily extracted
from the binary. It looks like the entire datastore is mutable/queryable after
authentication by default. Privileges can be revoked on datastores after
creation, which is obviously not ideal since it limits your app's
capabilities.

In its current form, this is inappropriate for all but the most basic use
cases.

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lacker
Hi Scott. Just to clarify, the client API does not use the app's global
credentials, but the client credentials which have their access limited in
several ways. One is the per-column access configuration, which lets you set
up objects where access is restricted to users with the relevant token. The
other main security restriction is user-based authentication, which ensures
user data can only be updated by a client authenticated as that user. The
combination of these security methods handle a lot of use cases, and we're
always looking to add more security functionality to make more use cases work
securely.

If you have a specific application in mind, I'd love to chat with you about
how it maps onto our security model. Feel free to drop me a line at
kevin@parse.com.

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scotth
I do see "class" level permissions, as I mentioned in my previous post, but
nothing suggesting that finer grain control exists. I do see that you can
store data on the authenticated user, which is a good start.

And if better security is something that's in the works, that's great. I'm not
looking to give you guys a bad name. I just saw this being talked about in the
startups I work around, and felt as if some of the less experienced developers
were not considering what implications using a service like this might have.
It's convenient, I'll give you that -- but instead of facilitating good
security through its APIs, it obscures the need for it altogether. And from
what I can see, it would be difficult for you guys to encourage good practice
without being heavy handed.

Let's just hope your users are smart about how they use your product, because
I'd hate to see what effect a few breaches might have.

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lacker
That's a good way to describe our goals with Parse security - to "encourage
good practice without being heavy handed". We are always looking for ways to
make Parse easier, including security, so we definitely won't stop with what
we have now. If you have specific suggestions feel free to drop me an email.

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nupark2
Parse sounds like it will be another Urban Airship, not Heroku, unless:

\- They enormously extend their offering to support development of arbitrary
server-side code.

\- They figure out how to do this in a way that doesn't introduce inescapable
lock-in for application developers.

\- They figure out how to differentiate this offering from what similar
server-side deployment/platform services already provide (Heroku, EC2,
AppEngine, whatever).

That's not to say UA or Parse won't ever see a big exit (in this market, who
knows). Rather, I seriously doubt -- in either case -- that the economics are
there for more than a profitable "lifestyle business".

(no negativity implied -- I favor lifestyle businesses, but VCs don't).

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tmcneal
In regards to your first bullet, one of Parse's competitors, CloudMine, allows
developers to write their own server-side JavaScript code that executes within
a sandboxed environment: <https://cloudmine.me/developer_zone#code/overview>

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thepumpkin1979
Got your point, but I think Parse.com's goal is to provide a data persistence
service for Mobile developers that DON'T want to code anything on the server
side. It's a simple persistence service, why would I code anything on
Javascript in a third party/hosting or SDK like Cloudmine if I can do the same
thing in Heroku or Joyent using the full power of Node.JS? :)

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drumdance
I build a Cloudmine app yesterday at a Hackathon. Setup was very fast and
early one we didn't have a need for server-side processing. But then
requirements evolved (as they always do) and we found the Javascript hooks
very useful.

Speaking as someone who has never used node.js before, it was nice to not have
to worry about setup and just start coding.

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alexholehouse
If I could commit a couple of years of my life to work at a company right now
(and hey, I may still be able to depending on various circumstances) Parse
would certainly be up there.

Seems like an awesome product, and user feedback from pretty much everyone
involved has been overwhelmingly positive. That's a good combination.

Great round well deserved.

(Full disclosure, this isn't a space I've worked in before, I'm just going on
what people I respect who _are_ in the space have said)

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lacker
_If I could commit a couple of years of my life to work at a company right now
(and hey, I may still be able to depending on various circumstances) Parse
would certainly be up there._

Well if you change your mind, we are certainly hiring. Just send a resume to
jobs@parse.com ;-)

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aherlambang
I've been using Parse to build one my apps votespot. As the others said, it's
one of the easiest framework to integrate with your project. The team are very
helpful and listen to users problems, they even answer emails on weekends.
Again kudos to the team. Sorry if I've been bugging you guys with questions
and non-sense issues =)

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jeffreymcmanus
Something about "outsource server-side back-end" doesn't, um, parse for me.

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pothibo
Today is full of irony.

This morning Adobe announced that they were shutting down Flash for mobile
(vendor lock-in): Everyone praising.

This afternoon, we have Parse that raises 5.5M$ (More vendor lock-in): Most
people praising.

To me, Parse sounds like an utopia. It does look very promising and the
premise is very interesting. However, what happens if you need to move to some
other backend (If you hit an Instagr.am's hockey puck growth for example)?

If you want analytics on your backend?

How about if you need to moderate some of your content?

Lots of black magic and while you can just switch a DNS entry on heroku, you
can't do so on Parse...

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lacker
A couple notes. Analytics and content moderation are possible right now
through the REST API - we have developers using the API for both of those in
fact.

<https://www.parse.com/docs/rest>

You can also moderate content manually through the data browser.

As far as scalability goes, our team has a lot of experience designing web-
scale products. We're designing Parse from the ground up to scale. If anyone
has an application that they're concerned how Parse can handle the load, we're
glad to chat about it - just drop us a line at feedback@parse.com.

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maxklein
Parse probably has the easiest-to-integrate library I have ever used...in my
life. It took me five minutes to have a database backend to store 'share
event's for my mobile apps.

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lclarkmichalek
How similar is Parse to Urban Airship? I notice Parse lists push notifications
on their homepage, and that seems to be one of the big things about Urban
Airship.

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lacker
Parse offers a lot besides push notifications as well - you can store
arbitrary data on Parse, do user authentication, and access the data from non-
mobile devices using the REST API. We'd be glad to answer any other questions
you have at feedback@parse.com.

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pekk
What an awful namespace collision this introduces.

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lacker
Sorry about that ;-) The upside is that it's a short name so it saves you
typing.

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scottschulthess
I don't think this is anything like Heroku

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stonemetal
It depends on your definition. Define Heroku as web servers in the cloud. Then
sure nothing alike. Define Heroku more generally as Web back end in the cloud.
Then define parse as mobile back end in the cloud. They now share "back end in
the cloud" and differ on what back end they provide with some overlap.

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Nemisis7654
I've been building an app using Parse for a while now and I am loving it.
Congratulations to the Parse team.

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lacker
Thanks! We thrive on user feedback so feel free to send us suggestions for new
features or ideas about what could be made easier in mobile development.
feedback@parse.com

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janj
Parse user here, I think it's great. I'm curious to see if they do anything
with their Facebook integration. I could see them building a user interest
profile based on what apps the user has which could be very valuable to both
developers and advertisers.

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alduler
While I love the idea I wonder how dangerous it is set your business on top of
this thing given the possibility Parse can go out of business some time in the
future? I mean, it ain't no AWS backed by Amazon that has quite the track
record.

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henrikschroder
Remember that the alternative is no business at all.

We have a similar product where we provide a backend for game developers, and
there are quite a few of them making quite a lot of money on it. But without
us, those single developers or small teams simply wouldn't be able to pull off
the games that they do, because they don't have the knowledge or resources to
make the backend systems we offer.

If you can afford to make your own backend systems, you're not the target for
Parse, or us.

(Oh, and it's not like AWS has a 100% stellar track record either. :-) )

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catshirt
isn't _heroku_ "heroku for mobile"?

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thibaut_barrere
After signing up for the beta it's clearly targeted to mobile apps developers
who don't want to create their back-end.

It provides a good bunch of interesting features and skeleton of apps for
Android and iOS.

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mark_l_watson
Great idea - no wonder they got good funding!

They support data store functions, push notifications with some nice options,
user management, and user auth and security.

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suhail
Good luck guys.

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tikhon
thanks suhail! :)

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benologist
Congrats guys!

