Ask HN: What is Parse?

8 points·zuck9··3 comments

This is a very noobish question, sorry about that. I've spent the last several minutes trying to understand what Parse.com is but I still don't get it. What does Parse Cloud do? Does it take care of all my database needs? (Replacement for MySQL?)

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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.

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.

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.

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