Last week Parse (a Facebook company) announced they would be shutting down service January 2017. This was pretty lousy news since I have come to really like the service. It was packed with all kinds of cool features. Parse also provided the backend for the Finesse SMS Gadget I made and was recently posted on Cisco’s developer site.
Since the service wasn’t shutting down until 2017 I didn’t feel a huge rush to convert my projects to something new. That was until they stopped accepting new accounts! I spent some time evaluating other alternatives and finally landed on Firebaseio.com as the solution for my gadget. So I spent this afternoon converting the gadget over to Firebase. Firebase while similar to Parse doesn’t have all of the same features. I found myself doing more sorting/filtering in JavaScript/jQuery than I had to with Parse’s native query methods. Hopefully some of this is due to the fact that I am still learning how to use Firebase. I will clean up the code as I learn.
The updated gadget was posted to github. If you run into any issues, let me know.
I was glad to get everything working properly with Firebase. Now I need to decide if I want to use Firebase for the iOS app I am working on or run my own Parse server using the open source code Parse released. I am leaning toward the latter.