“Man I wish I had Parse back then,” Mark Zuckerberg. When Facebook’s CEO says something like this, it is a big deal. Parse is the mobile backend service that Facebook acquired back in April to strengthen its platform services offering. It helps developers store their apps’ data in the cloud, handle identity log-ins, deliver push notifications, and roll out custom code from the cloud. Parse was the first paid B2B service provided by Facebook.
Parse recently had its first ever developer conference where a host of new features, tools & integrations were announced to improve the experience for developers who use Parse. Let’s look at what Parse has in store for developers:
- Analytics – With brand new analytics, developers can now track their app’s growth, push notification effectiveness, stability, and more through Parse, rather than having to dump data out into Excel like before. Parse will automatically pull in metrics about logins, data usage, and more so developers know what they need to fix or double down on.
- Background Jobs – Parse will also allow developers to write little snippets of JavaScript to schedule and run recurring tasks without requiring their own servers. These include sending emails and doing other jobs faster because of Parse’s big server power to the tasks.
- Unity Partnership – Unity, the game engine used by more than 2 million developers to handle graphics rendering and more for iOS, Android and Windows games recently got into a partnership with Parse. This partnership has created a Parse Unity SDK that will make it easy for Parse developers to build their games on Unity.
- User Sessions Modules – The new User Sessions modules make it simple to manage login and logout for users on both mobile and the web, bringing the previously second-class web development experience to parity with Parse’s MBaaS.
- Image Modules – With minimal code run in the Parse cloud, developers can now manipulate images within their apps. Rather than just pull in an image from a user’s camera roll, Parse can resize, crop, tint, and do more to images.
None of these are necessarily “wow” features but rather the logical progression for Parse to extend its capabilities further. This conference was aimed at making the lives of developers easier, and these tools should help. Why would you bother doing analytics, background jobs, or image manipulation elsewhere when you can just do it in Parse?
Pocket App is multi-platform mobile solutions company. Our experienced and talented developers and designers have worked extensively used Parse for many projects. If you are also looking at building an application on any major platforms then please write to us on info@pocketapp.co.uk and we will get back to you.
