7 Parse alternatives or Parse It Yourself

Last Friday it was a bit disappointing to find out that Parse will discontinue its services. It used to be my favorite mBaaS as it was perfect for prototyping but also suitable for production data. It is a scalable solution, it has great documentation and is easy to use.

Many mobile developers of iOS and Android apps rely on the Parse backend system for data storage and push notifications. The fact that Facebook has decided to discontinue it is a bit surprising as they did put a lot of effort in supporting Apple TV (tvOS) and Apple watch recently.

What is Parse actually?

Parse is a mobile Backend as a Service (mBaaS) that uses a MongoDB database to store data and Amazon S3 to store files. The Parse SDKs for Android and iOS include handy stuff such as caching and uploading data and files in the background. Other features are analytics, push notifications and cloud code, which is useful for the integration of mail and SMS functionality for example.

If you want to create a new app using a mBaas right now there are some interesting alternatives. But if you do have an app that currently is using the Parse SDK probably your only option is to use the Parse Server. Here is a tutorial to find out what you need to keep your app running on the Parse technology. Or have a look on Github where the source for the Parse Server is hosted.

Some of the features supported by the Parse Server:

• CRUD operations
• Schema validation
• Pointers
• Users
• Installations
• Sessions
• Roles

Some of the not or not fully supported features:

• Push notifications
• Facebook login
• Web based dashboard

It cannot be too difficult to reanimate most of the Parse functionality using the recently published open source Parse Server. And that is what The distance has planned to do. Well, more or less. They have plans to offer hosting for the Parse Server.

Apps on the big screen part II; tvOS app development for real

Earlier I wrote about apps on the big screen, apps for Apple TV and for Android TV. Earlier I have been so lucky to receive one of the Apple TV developers kits so I had some time to play with it. Is it the larger screen or are the many new options that could become available with it causing all the fun? Anyway, I am having a great time creating apps for the new platform.

I had to buy an USB-C to USB-A cable to connect the Apple TV to my Mac book, because Apple informed me that using iTunes on a Mac is the only way to update the Apple TV. That cable did not come with my developers kit so it took some time to get one, as an USB-C cable is not yet in my otherwise large cable collection.

Hello TV!

So I connected the two devices only to find out that iTunes was not able to connect to the server. So, no update yet. But it was fun to find out that I was able to deploy directly from xCode to the TV.

It is not really different from running an app on your iPhone but I was surprised because I thought I had to use the TestFlight app for that and so far I had seen my early creations on the simulator only.

Get up to speed

There is no need to dive into TVML right away. You can use existing Objective-C or Swift code or code snippets and get up to speed with tvOS real quickly. The downside is that currently not all frameworks that exists for iOS are available for tvOS (yet). For some of them that makes sense as Apple TV development comes with some known limitations.

One of them is the lack of any option for local persistency. All application data needs to be stored in the (i)cloud. What makes less sense is that, for example, the Event Kit framework is missing for tvOS. I am sure there will be a workaround for this but these kind of things do not make the life of a tvOS developer very easy.

Parse & tvOS

Using SDKs from third parties in your tvOS project can be an issue as well. For my app I want to store data in the cloud using Parse. I cannot use iCloud because I want to share the app with Apple TV and with Android TV users.

Unfortunately Parse cannot be used, basically because the SDK supports caching and other local persistancy features. It is not going to work and you have to wait until the guys at Parse release a tvOS specific version of their SDK or you can try to use the Parse Rest API and do some things yourself.

Conclusion

Since I am a huge fan of Parse I really miss their SDK for tvOS. On GitHub you can find a Parse REST API approach for tvOS. It is written in Swift and although minimalistic it looks like an interesting start to make my tv app work with Parse anyway.

I still have not totally grokked tvOS yet and how to work around existing limitations but I am doing some great research on the topic. In the mean time you can check out some interesting resources on the topic. There are some nice examples available here. Or check this site or this one.

Or watch this video or this one.

Further reading

• 1. TvOS tutorial (Madeupbypeople)
• 2. Understanding tvOS
• 3. Coding for Apple TV: tvOS Programming Tutorial Overview
• 4. How to build an Apple TV App Tutorial for tvOS
• 5. Parse SDK iOS/tvOS issues on Github
• 6. A Parse REST API approach for tvOS