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Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure about this.

I'm writing a pretty complicated application using parse. It's been great so far. I've been a very vocal non-fan of their iOS SDK though, so much so that I'm actually dropping it in favor of a custom written job using their REST API instead. But besides that one thing, it's been fantastic.

The new Cloud code stuff they just added is awesome.

I spent 10 years doing heavy backend shit until about 5 years ago when I switched back to native front-end development. I still am having to write a service here or there to cover some holes that Parse doesn't cover for this application, but those are pretty small holes.

A+++ would use again.

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As a (paying) customer of Parse, and someone who really like their iOS SDK - what is it that you don't like? Is it that the stuff you're trying to do doesn't play well with the way the SDK is architected, or is a more general dislike of the approach (compared with, say, the rather more structured incremental-store based SDK that StackMob use)?

I don't like that subclassing generally doesn't work. You can subclass PFObject no problem, but you lose it when you are doing a lot of PFQuery'ing. PFUser would be a prime candidate for subclassing but that really doesn't work without a lot of shim'ing.

I don't like the lack of client side persistence. There is caching with PFQuery but it's caching the json response from the server. For example, let's say I have a message board with 1000 messages. If the user posts a message, I can't simply add the new post and have it cached, I would have to query and pull down all 1001 messages.

Now, I've written all the boilerplate around the parse SDK to do all of this, but it was kind of hacky. So now I'm ripping it all out and just using the REST API with my own custom digs. Much smoother. I'm slowly moving it over to it's own static lib at: https://github.com/jawngee/CloudObject

Don't get me wrong though, their SDK is definitely usable, but after a certain point it becomes a little cumbersome.

PFObject subclassing and a more comprehensive offline solution are both very high on our list of features we would like to add. We're just taking our time to make sure we get them right. :)

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