If you are in the development world, you would know how important it is to build apps quickly. The time to market determines if you will become successful or not.
Meet Parse, an open-source platform that you can use to make your app development process faster. It offers RESTful API and also a way to set up a database so that you can start your development as soon as possible. It is advertised as a “complete application stack” which comes with tons of features for faster development.
How Parse lets you quickly build apps
The first thing that you will notice about Parse is the SDK that it comes with. With Parse, you don’t need to write code to implement the major application features such as push notification, user authentication, and even the dashboard. This gives novice developers or even users the ability to create full-functional apps.
The Role of APIs
What if you are a full-fledged developer and wants to build apps quickly? Don’t worry, Parse also lets you take advantage of the APIs(Application Programming Interface). Currently, the SDKs are available for almost all the major development ecosystem including the iOS, Android, JavaScript, Unity, .NET, PHP, Arduino, Cloud Code and Embedded C. This means that you use Parse in most of your app development endeavors.
Installation and documentation
Installing Parse is easy and should not take more than a few minutes. The below code is an example of how easy it is to install the Parse SDK and start using it in your app.
dependencies {
implementation 'com.parse.bolts:bolts-android:1.4.0'
implementation 'com.parse:parse-android:1.17.3'
implementation 'com.squareup.okhttp3:logging-interceptor:3.8.1' // for logging API calls to LogCat
}
The above code will go into the app/build.gradle considering you are building an Android app.
After installation, you need to initialize the SDK in your application and use it. If you want to learn more on how to do it, we recommend checking out the Android guide on using Parse.
The documentation of Parse is also good. You can check out their Parse Server Guide and Client SDK Guides for a better understanding. Almost all the main platforms have been covered by Parse.
Almost every app out there has some common features out there. For example, most of the apps have a dashboard, authentication, push notification, data analytics or network integration.
Parse aims to provide the developers with an easy way to integrate the features with no or little hassle. Parse is an open source and self-hosted platform which takes care of most of the generic functionality of the app. The developer, on the other hand, can invest his time on coding the business logic rather than wasting time developing the backend. The self-hosting aspect makes Parse more appealing to developers than the paid ones. The paid options are hard to maintain, and the price to maintain them can grow rapidly as you keep developing your app.
How to use Parse?
To use Parse, you need a self-hosting platform such as Digital Ocean, AWS or Heroku. Once you have a proper hosting, you now need to use an appropriate database solution to go with it. The hosting that you choose needs to have appropriate administrative privileges. Parse does require some technical expertise, but if you don’t know how to host a Parse server, we can do it for you.
Conclusion
Parse is a popular platform and should be used to make the most out of your app development time. It has a rich SDK and provides excellent features out of the box. We’ve built lots of apps running on Parse. Now, we don’t worry about building a backend and an API separately for our apps. Parse takes care of them for us. Looking to get an app made quickly? Look no further. Get in touch with the best Parse developers now!