<story><title>Facebook is closing Parse</title><url>http://blog.parse.com/announcements/moving-on/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nodamage</author><text>This announcement just underscores the importance of having full control over your backend. Yes, it&amp;#x27;s more work, but if you&amp;#x27;re writing apps that seriously depend on backend services, it&amp;#x27;s simply too much risk to depend on anyone else.&lt;p&gt;Fortunately in this case Facebook offered generous lead time to migrate off Parse.com, but they were not obligated to do so, and other providers might not be so generous in the future.&lt;p&gt;Developers who depended on Parse now have an interesting decision to make: export their data into MongoDB and start running their own servers, or look for an alternative BaaS provider to do it for them (which carries the same risk of that provider shutting down in the future).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nodamage</author><text>A few more thoughts:&lt;p&gt;1. This effectively poisons the well for any other BaaS providers out there. If two of the biggest companies in this space (StackMob and Parse) can get acquired and shut down in less than 5 years, what does that say about the future of the smaller companies in this space? As a developer how could you possibly trust any of these companies going forward, based on this track record?&lt;p&gt;2. Syncing is notoriously difficult to get right. Building a generalized syncing solution is &lt;i&gt;even harder&lt;/i&gt;. Bugs in sync code tend to lead to data loss, which leads to angry customers. These types of bugs are hard enough to track down and fix in your own code. Trying to track down and fix bugs in complex third-party code can be damn near impossible.&lt;p&gt;If you decide to adopt a third party solution that purports to do your syncing for you, do your research carefully. Not just by looking at the toy samples which look easy to set up and work perfectly, but experiences and reports from actual developers who have tried such solutions. What kind of problems are they having? What are the limitations of the current implementation? How mature is the product? How responsive are they to bug reports? If something goes wrong and data is lost, how much insight do you have into the system to figure out why?</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook is closing Parse</title><url>http://blog.parse.com/announcements/moving-on/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nodamage</author><text>This announcement just underscores the importance of having full control over your backend. Yes, it&amp;#x27;s more work, but if you&amp;#x27;re writing apps that seriously depend on backend services, it&amp;#x27;s simply too much risk to depend on anyone else.&lt;p&gt;Fortunately in this case Facebook offered generous lead time to migrate off Parse.com, but they were not obligated to do so, and other providers might not be so generous in the future.&lt;p&gt;Developers who depended on Parse now have an interesting decision to make: export their data into MongoDB and start running their own servers, or look for an alternative BaaS provider to do it for them (which carries the same risk of that provider shutting down in the future).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snej</author><text>[Couchbase Lite architect here, so I have skin in this game]&lt;p&gt;Even better, if you&amp;#x27;re using an open protocol, you can work with _either_ a hosted back-end or one you own, and move between them pretty easily. HTTP being a good example of course.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that open protocols for general purpose data sync are pretty thin on the ground. Couchbase built our sync architecture on top of CouchDB&amp;#x27;s replication protocol, which was badly documented at the time but at least open.&lt;p&gt;Couchbase Mobile (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;couchbase.com&amp;#x2F;mobile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;couchbase.com&amp;#x2F;mobile&lt;/a&gt;) uses this open protocol, so you can either BYO server (our own Couchbase Sync Gateway, or CouchDB) or use a hosted one like Cloudant. And you&amp;#x27;ve got full access to the code (ours is all Apache licensed.)&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t say we&amp;#x27;re directly compatible with Parse, or trivial to migrate to (the data models and APIs are different), and I&amp;#x27;m obviously biased, but I do think it&amp;#x27;s a good alternative to jump ship to.</text></comment>