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I recently delved into app development on Xcode, and decided to develop a social app. I was using Parse as my mbaaS for a while, but unfortunately they are closing down. I was wondering in your experience what is(are) the best alternatives to Parse. Im basically using looking for something
1) easy to use
2) Well documented
3) Lots of tutorials
4) Can handle lots of RPS and users.
The app I am developing is a social app, so if you have any specific recommendation for an app of that type, that would help tremendously. Also it is important to note that I have no backend development experience, so it would be a challenge to develop my own.
Thanks again
There are several Parse alternatives out there right now:
AWS Mobile Hub - this is a direct Parse replacement that recently came out by AWS. Although this is in Beta, AWS is a well respected platform that supports many huge companies like Netflix and Yelp
Firebase - (acquired by Google) Firebase offers a great solution for real time communication and data storage. It's perfect if what you are doing is mainly data & realtime (chat, game, collaboration, etc...) but it's not very flexible for other things (e.g. payment, SMS, push notifications etc...) firebase.com
RapidAPI - a backend platform that allows for saving data and integrating APIs. It is based on blocks so each basic action is represented by a block. You can combine blocks to create logic. It has a bit of a higher learning curve but it's probably more flexible
BackAnd - a platforms that allows you to create an AngularJS ready backend for your app. Its really good of you are working on AngularJS web apps and your data is stored on Amazon RDS.
Baasbox is a good alternative to Parse. A lot of features used in Parse are there (Push messaging etc), so migrating an app is relatively straightforward. They provide an API for Android, iOS and Javascript.
One of the main advantages it has over Parse is that it can be hosted yourself (Although there is a hosted option available, but it's not free).
http://www.baasbox.com
Out of all the available backends, we found this to be most similar to Parse.
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Following Question is not for Negative voters, Infect I have to program an iOS app in Objective C, which works with MySQL Database on server side, since app requires to communicate with server(needs user to input few text boxes and to attach in Image).and on the otherside users can track a number to see results(uploaded by other users). hence I am restricted to use json coz json retrieves over all file and then extract required result from that file,
That's why I needs to use serverside MySQL and needs to run few queries(POST) to submit information provided by users and also needs some query to retrieve required number's row from MySQL Database.
Now the problem is that I am quite unknown from MySQL installation on serverside, and also unfamiliar that how to connect MySQL with my iOS app using Objective C.
Since there are lots of tutorials on the internet forums and as well as at youtube, but I am not able to make final selection that, which tutorial will be the best suitable for me to quick & Detailed learn these things, and Since last two days I am spending my lots of time but still unable to find any easy, quick & Complete tutorial for this purpose.
your quick help will be highly appreciated.
Thanks
In such kind of applications, their are Web API's / Web Services interface provided by using some server side scripting language coupled with a database, in your case the database is MySql.
A web service is a collection of open protocols and standards used for
exchanging data between applications or systems. Software applications
written in various programming languages and running on various
platforms can use web services to exchange data over computer networks
like the Internet in a manner similar to inter-process communication
on a single computer. This interoperability (e.g., between Java and
Python, or Windows and Linux applications) is due to the use of open
standards.
These web services provide API's in form of some URL's with specific parameters and on the behalf of those parameters it communicate with the database and return some data either in XML or in JSON. And on the behalf of that data the user's app can perform various tasks.
Web Service Reference
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I am currently building a virtual classroom website and so far I have successfully added webcam & audio functionality.
The next thing that is on my list is to add realtime document collaboration.
So how this would work is:
Two people join a private session
These two people have a shared document that they can both edit and changes are displayed in realtime to the other user.
An example of this would be google docs where you can be multiple people on one document.
Anyway, I have seen a few APIs that do this, for example I have looked into google docs api, but it requires you to have a google account which is not optimal. (Registering both on my website and on google docs can be a hassle or too much work for some people).
I have also looked into Zoho, but I am unsure if it can fill my needs.
Does anyone of you know an API that can do this? Preferably both document and sheets(excel looking).
Thanks!
The Google Realtime API is especially well-suited for document collaboration, but it sounds like it's not a good fit. There are a few other options out there:
ShareDB is an open-source realtime database backend, used in the DerbyJS framework.
Mozilla's TogetherJS provides view-level collaboration features.
Convergence (disclaimer: I am a founder) is a new hosted platform providing APIs for this sort of functionality. We have identified the most common pain points when implementing realtime collaboration features, and provide high-level APIs to solve them.
Multiplayer is concurrent editing database, it looks like it is based on Operation Transforms and they are planning to launch on Kickstarter. Looks like it can do exactly what you need, and they use Websockets to send changes in real-time.
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Objective/ Problem: I'm beginning to build an iOS app which will have a ton of images. It's not a photo app (it's a trivia type app) so the photos are not user photos. The app-size can't be huge as then it will take a long time to download from the App Store and take up space on the phone.
Question: If I'm not an expert developer or backend developer, what is my best option for storing the photos online and retrieving them as needed with simple code?
Research:
What I'm looking for seems to fall under the umbrella of "backend". The easy answer used to be Parse, which is a BaaS company (backend-as-a-service). However, they are shutting down. There also used to be PayPal's "StackMob", a BaaS company but they shutdown in 2014.
Both Parse and StackMob were built for people like me, indie-developers with no backend knowledge. Yet, as two of the biggest services shutdown choosing BaaS as a solution is now viewed as risky.
Big companies and expert backend developers will just build their own database, load the photos onto it, and query it as needed.
Yet, I'm no expert. Can anyone let me know what replaced Parse as being the easiest/turn-key solution? After I upload the original photos, the user will never need to add/change any.
If you can make your file names unique you don't even really need a back end. You can just use generic web services. I handled a very similar problem using Amazon Web services S3 which just provides basic HTTP downloads.
I package groups of image file into
zip files and then request a download of the zip to download the group of files. I found a third-party wrapper for zip decompression in Objective-C and use that to unzip the packages into the application documents directory.
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I have been given a task to develop server architecture a multiplayer online game (for android and iOS). Game will involve messaging interaction between player (not too much data will be sent, but it will be frequent).
After exploring the internet, web-sockets and XMPP server seems to be the available option for me. And I am a little bended towards Web Sockets and basically I am a Ruby on Rails developer (available option for me is faye).
And after digging a little more, I am came across Socket.IO used in NodeJS. It looks good, but I am a little worried about the scalability. We are expecting a huge traffic in future, so I am not sure whether NodeJS can handle such traffic or not.
What do you guys suggest, Web Sockets (if yes, then what the best option for me) or XMPP servers ?
If you are a Rails developer and feeling comfortable using web technologies then you should definitely use WebSockets.
XMPP is great but handling XMPP with Ruby is hard and you need to learn XMPP first. Also most of the XMPP servers are written in Erlang.
For websocket on a Rails app your best choice is websocket-rails. It's built on top of Faye and Eventmachine and pretty fast. We are currently using it for a realtime chat app that has nearly 1k connections and still has a lot of room to grow.
Btw if you gonna use websocket-rails Thin web server plays really nice with it. You can create a cluster and scale linearly.
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I'm trying to build a basic social iOS app in the new iOS 6 beta as a proof-of-concept project to improve my iOS development skills. In essence I want to allow users to generate an account, store some info in the cloud, and then be able to pull their info (and that of their friends) into the device. I already have a front end roughed in on the device but I now need to start the networking component and am looking for suggestions for any libraries, frameworks, tutorials and/or guidelines to use.
I was thinking of building the server end with node.js and mongodb as I already have a RESTful API built on them which I can adapt to this task. Is this the best way to accomplish such an app? I'm open to any suggestions.
A couple more networking library suggestions:
1) AFNetworking - https://github.com/afnetworking/afnetworking . This is widely used (more so now that ASIHttpRequest has stopped development). It is modern and block-based. However, it is not ARC yet.
2) MKNetworkKit - https://github.com/MugunthKumar/MKNetworkKit . Modern and ARC based.
I switched all my apps from ASIHttpRequest to AFNetworking and highly recommend it.
All the frameworks mentioned so far (ASIHttpRequest, RESTKit, AFNetworking, MKNetworkKit) will talk to a node.js/restful API backend just fine.
The most common and popular libraries to handle network connections are ASIHTTPRequest: http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/ and RESTKit: http://restkit.org . I am using RESTKit right now as a component of the Salesforce library. I used ASIHTTPRequest in the past and found it to be a very good library. I haven't used it in a while but i highly recommend it.
Edit: I would also reccomend CocoaRestClient to test your APIs.