I built a thing. Answer 20 quick thought-provoking questions. Chat anonymously with people that answered exactly the same. Game resets at midnight UTC.
Good point, however, I'm not sure I can recall a time during which someone intended to collect a URL from me but allowed just "example.com" as a valid input. I'd venture to guess that the validation enforced more often than not actually helps the site owner achieve their intended goal.
Agreed, 100%, about the tone of the "community advocates" parse has answering questions and supporting the forums (their internal + s/o). Huge turn off.
The downtime is extremely frustrating. They are pretty nonchalant about it as well, which is actually more of a concern than the fact that there was an issue.
Beyond that, there are some good use cases for apps to be built upon Parse and bad ones. It turns out that the thing I'm building is one of those bad use cases.
Parse appears to frown upon background processes. They have very tight restrictions on what can be done in the background and how fast it must be done.
If you have a social-esque app, at any kind of scale, fanning things out becomes a problem.
We're in the middle of packing up our toys and heading over to GAE.
I'd love to hear more about why you think we're nonchalant about downtime. We definitely need to improve reliability and are working hard to do so but also spend a lot of effort on writing up detailed postmortems (e.g. http://status.parse.com/incidents/j336l474l8h4) to be as transparent as possible even if it's painful.
You're right that there are some applications that are a good fit for Parse and others that aren't. We have many social-esque apps that are doing fine so I'd love to hear more. That said, we know it's not "one size fits all" and are working to productize/integrate some Facebook technologies that should make fanning out and other things way better.
