We use it in our games with leaderboards for user login.
How will it affect your games/business and what should we do?
I just got this in my inbox.
Parse a company that assists developers make cross platform mobile apps is shutting it’s doors
http://blog.parse.com/announcements/moving-on/
Web Archive Snapshot before they killed the site:
http://web.archive.org/web/20151120012528/https://parse.com/
Products:
http://web.archive.org/web/20151117012946/https://parse.com/products
Documentation:
http://web.archive.org/web/20151117013019/https://parse.com/docs
I guess they ran out of money.
Oh jeez that’s like the 4th big back end provider to shut down in the past couple years. I thought Parse had staying power especially with all that Facebook money. With Parse shutting down frankly it makes me nervous to commit to any other 3rd party providers. Seems like self managed servers are the way to go.
Oh and one more thing, I think their pricing scheme was atrocious. It jumped from 0 to $200 per month once you went past the free tier. And the price was mainly based on number of API calls. I’m sure people were doing what they could to limit the amount of API calls. I honestly think it should be based on number of devices like how GameSparks does it.
Their scheme was atrocious. Going from Free to 100%/month was stupid. I also had to jump a few times to the paid tier but it was a waste since I just need the extra request only on sporadic times. So what I basically did was creating a cache on another server and managing the parse error on my apps.
It really sucks, I have an app already relying heavily on Parse and another one in the works 
Still, we have 1 year to switch, they’ll shutdown in jan 2017.
Anyone here using Coronium? I was planning to use it but Parse seemed easier to implement, more reliable and stable, since it was a FB owned company (guess what I was damn wrong…). Any impression?
Also… this would be a great moment for Corona to show a little of their Corona Clouds
As for Corona Cloud, wasn’t there an attempt on it a few years ago and then they shut it down?
Yes it was. I think at the time they also bought another company for the backend ( https://coronalabs.com/blog/2012/12/13/coronifying-the-cloud-corona-labs-acquires-game-minion/ ) but not really sure what happened.
Since Corona hired Develephant (who made Coronium) I guess the base of the new Clouds will be Coronium?
I haven’t tried it so I’m not sure how it performs, but the Parse plugin by Develephant is really well made (and with great documentation)… I’m positive we’ll see something cool for Cloud if he’s working on it.
I did a heap of research into authorization API services, cloud storage etc and said no to the lot. I prefer to run my own server that I manage myself on https://www.digitalocean.com
If you have not seen http://www.c9.io check out my guide here as it is a cloud based IDE that allows you to SSH to your server and resume from anywhere. I have a few digital ocean servers and can ramp up to multiple cores and only get charged by the hour. I get snapshots and live backups and access to whatever I want.
My guide on Connecting C9.io connecting to Digital Ocean.
A have a few more guides here http://fearby.com/
As for Cloud databases I prefer http://cloudant.com from IBM ( check out my corona guides here and here on talking to cloudant).
Saving to Cloudant DBaaS from Corona SDK
I am developing my own API behind a secure SSL and NodeJS server along with PHP for account info and Cloudant CouchDB for larger data generated in apps. I’d be happy to continue sharing code.
There seems to be a little light at the end of the tunnel. Parse is making their servers open source, anyone can host and use the Parse API. Hopefully there will be a third party host that picks this up. Thanks for sharing your links Simon, I’ll definitely check them out and follow your development. It’s good to know there are other options.
Thanks a lot Simon!
It would take a day to spin up a new self managed Digital Ocean Ubuntu server with NGINX/NodeJS with MySQL/PHP with Pooled Node-MySQL connections that can handle over 15,000 database reads a minute from 2 cores over SSL.
Guide here:
http://fearby.com/article/how-to-setup-pooled-mysql-connections-in-node-js-that-dont-disconnect/
SSL Guide:
http://fearby.com/article/adding-a-commercial-ssl-certificate-to-a-digital-ocean-vm
I use PHP OpCache and and tested In Memory caching to get massive jumps from PHP too (will blog those).
Parse gives source for back end. Is it possible to get source for admin panel as well?
I have used my own backend implementations for all my personal and client projects and they work really well. There are so many library that help you connect a mobile application with a backend server with very good response time. Even though I use C# as a backend I find the articles from @simon.fearby very interesting.
It’s also probably cheaper as you can use your backend server on a site like Amazon Web Services or Azure and scale the server resources when needed which I think costs less than Parse and also you’d have full control over your server.
I have no plan to change to a service like Parse and even less when @Vince_ mention that it’s the 4th big backend provider that shut downs.
Best regards,
Tomas
Tomas
I have 20 years in corporate mostly Microsoft based back ends and I thought AWS of Google would be the shiz for a backend. I mostly play with corona for fun (but have a HUGE project in development now). AWS and Google no doubt would be mega reliable in the future (unless their fibre piper get hit by mentalists (happening over San Fran now and they can’t catch rhem). I chose not to go with AWS because it seemed to be 10x more than your own server that you control (important when your app is not profitable.
Spinning up a Ubuntu domain at https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=99a5082b6de5 was so easy, the trick was to use the awesome http://www.c9.io to allow me to connect to the server (securely) from a web browser was great.
I first installed NGINX (because it is way faster than Apache (so I can run PHP), the. Setup NodeJs under NGINX and use a proxy to specify what URLs are sent to NodeJs. Then I installed MySQL, phpMyAdmin etc (so I have the same as a CPanel domain but one that I can tweak and speed up with (swap file/ MySQL and in memory caches).
Sure managing my own server and updates is an issue but I know I am only getting one bill and if I get stuck am only one Google away from a solution.
E.g “How to install MySQL into digital ocean”, “Dow to install NodeJs on digitalocean”, “How to optimise PHP etc”.
I hope to make more guides around digital ocean to assist anyone using corona.
For the ones with more programming knowledge than just Corona SDK I think it saves money and time to use your own implementation. Maybe not after the first implemantation but for sure in the long run and especially when something goes wrong (i.e. easier to troubleshoot).
When it comes to Corona users in general I think that they don’t have that much experience with developing i.e. Corona/Lua is their first language and they start without proper understanding of designing code and this makes it easier to just use a service such as Parse instead of write their own.
Best regards,
Tomas
>I have no plan to change to a service like Parse and even less when @Vince_ mention that it’s the 4th bigbackend provider that shut downs.
Don’t quote me on that! Lol. That might be hyperbole on my end, but honestly it seems like these services rise and die often. The ones that stick out in my mind are StackMob – which was acquired by PayPal, the first iteration of Corona Cloud, and now Parse.
@PXL and all
You definately should try out Coronium. I can’t recommend it enough.
First time I tried it I had an instance up and running on digital ocean (including implementation of user registration, mailserver, database and file upload in my app) in less than two hours.
The backend is scriptable with lua and everything is well documented. It couldn’t be easier.
So exited develephant joined the corona team.
I agree, Coronium is awesome and I love it. Super easy to use. I just don’t know how scalable it is. Chris himself said it was meant for small to medium size use cases, so it might be fine for most hobby developers out there. For anyone else that expects millions of users, you might have to look somewhere else.
Vince, could you explain the limitation? I was looking at AWS to host player files and other data types a cross all devices. Is the limitation the price point? Or how much their servers can handle in terms of bandwidth and server specifications? I’m new to servers, so I have no idea what to look for, how to make them, or what would be a good fit for our app. I would greatly appreciate any advice or experiences you’ve had, if of course, you don’t mind.