Interesting — Facebook Buys Parse To Offer Mobile Development Tools As Its First Paid B2B Service (via TC).
First congrats to Parse, for the monetization event.
I have been a Parse.com fan for a while and even wrote a few months ago an article on using Parse on Android that was published at IBM DeveloperWorks.
Indeed, the Parse API is pretty cool — a very well thought out/organized API with platform/OS-specific bindings, and a very cool “cloud code”.
One of the things I liked about Parse was its independence from the “rest”. But this independence is now gone.
From the developer’s perspective, I have mix feelings about this acquisition — the only apps I want to run against or have dependencies to the Facebook back-end are Facebook apps, and nothing else. As a consequence, my use of Parse will not be limited mainly to such.
There is an alternative to Parse: Apigee, another back-end as a service/cloud API company I am a fan of. They have an API similar to Parse; not as sophisticated, but I believe it will get there. Apigee was a speaker at Android Dev Austin a few months back and I can see how Apigee will continue to evolve. As a matter of fact, this acquisition of Parse by Facebook is probably a good thing for Apigee. (Note to self: write an article on Apigee’s APIs).
ceo