12 ms·

Kinto – open-source alternative to Firebase and Parse

350 points by vladikoff 11y ago

ndesaulniers 11y ago
Heh, so last week my buddy Tarek Ziade (one of the developers of this) and I were talking about this (kinto) project he's working on. I asked him what the meaning behind the name was. He said "you know the cloud from Dragon Ball. They don't use it as much in DBZ since they can fly." I asked him if he meant "flying Nimbus?" Apparently, something was lost in translation (I'm in the US, he's in France).
- mikexstudios 11y ago
  Well, "kinto" is the name for the cloud in Japanese (see: http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/Flying_Nimbus http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/Flying_Nimbus).
- tarekmoz 11y ago
  Yeah the full name is "Kinto-un" :)
simple10 11y ago
From the Dockerfile [1], it looks like it's built on top of postgres. I'm excited to see if anyone uses Kinto for more than a weekend project. [1] https://github.com/Kinto/kinto/blob/master/Dockerfile https://github.com/Kinto/kinto/blob/master/Dockerfile
- rhizome31 11y ago
  From the Overview page: At Mozilla, Kinto is used in Firefox and Firefox OS for global synchronization of settings and assets, as well as a first-class solution for personal data in browser extensions and Web apps.
sbarre 11y ago
So I read through the docs for a few minutes and something wasn't entirely clear.. It shows "offline-first design" so does that mean I can use it as a local storage in the browser/device, and it can sync later to a server?
- arosequist 11y ago
  That's what it looks like [1]. Every operation is done locally via IndexedDB, and then you manually perform syncs. [1] https://kintojs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://kintojs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
  - quantisan 11y ago
    Great! We run Firebase in production. Offline-first is one of the most important features for us. (I know, Firebase isn't there yet) I'm surprised this isn't showcased more prominently on their marketing.
    - jamest 11y ago
      Firebase does have offline support for iOS/Android[1]. Web support is coming. [1] https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-05-29-announcing-mobile-offline-support.html https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-05-29-announcing-mobile-o...
chrstphrhrt 11y ago
This looks really cool. Do you have a gitter channel or something? Would love to talk shop about the design decisions! Email me at chris at ramses dot tech. (I'm one of the devs of http://ramses.tech http://ramses.tech)
- vladikoff 11y ago
  There is an irc channel, join #storage on Mozilla IRC https://search.mibbit.com/networks/Mozilla/%23storage https://search.mibbit.com/networks/Mozilla/%23storage
rbranson 11y ago
Isn't one of the main benefits of something like Firebase or Parse that you don't have to run it? It's nice that Kinto packages the stack together and provides plug-and-play APIs, but there's quite a bit of expertise and overhead operating a backend stack in production.
- metasean 11y ago
  We're actually building an open-source alternative to services like Firebase and Parse. Ours is a fully peer-to-peer, real-time, graph database that doesn't require a lot of expertise or overhead, and is extensible. http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ / https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun / https://gitter.im/amark/gun https://gitter.im/amark/gun
- mxuribe 11y ago
  I believe, really, its more about being indie and such. Its the same reason many people can just run gmail - or google apps for your domain - as opposed to the heavy-lifting of running your own email server, etc. Not like I'm an expert, but running one's email - and ensuring high degree of deliverability nowadays - is quite difficult. There are those who choose to run something on their own, maybe to learn, maybe for privacy's sake, etc. I'm sure those who do so, dive in with their eyes wide open. ;-)
- aidos 11y ago
  Maybe, but there are others of us who don't use firebase because we can't outsource our datastore like that. It goes both ways.
  - cristoph 11y ago
    You can use Parse an Firebase to store sensitive data by applying client side encryption. Of course one of the biggest problem is: how do you query that data since it's encrypted. But lately, there are some start-ups that aim to make encryption searchable. See ZeroDB, CryptDB, IQrypt.- the last one is designed to be used for Parse and Firebase: http://iqrypt.com/docs/Home/ http://iqrypt.com/docs/Home/
- 11y ago
Raed667 11y ago
Looks impressive, but as a Parse user I think that the selling point are the open-sourced SDKs for lots of platforms. EDIT: this seems to be lacking a graphical administration panel as well.
- harunurhan 11y ago
  I agree with you, but I think SDKs for at least Android and iOS will be available very soon.
- maxwin 11y ago
  Agree.They should at least have Android and ios SDK.
- tarekmoz 11y ago
  > this seems to be lacking a graphical administration panel as well we are working on one, that's almost ready. Should be released sometimes during Q1
  - Raed667 11y ago
    Great, I'm really excited about testing this on my VPS. Hope it handle the load.
- 0k1n 11y ago
  https://github.com/Kinto/kinto-admin https://github.com/Kinto/kinto-admin
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
vskarine 11y ago
Would be nice if they included RethinkDB in comparison as well
miles_matthias 11y ago
I'm a big fan of services like Parse & Firebase so it's cool to see something open source and independent get released. I've never made the jump to use Parse or Firebase in production though because inevitably I have to write some custom server code to do some integration. For example - payments with Stripe. Charges should only occur on your server (not on the client) but I've yet to see anyone allow you to configure a payment trigger in one of these services.
- acgourley 11y ago
  We use parse with stripe. The client drives the transaction and then stripe hits your parse cloud function via webhook with the confirmation.
- chuinard 11y ago
  I've done exactly that - integrated Stripe with our Firebase-backed app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twansoftware.invoicemakerpro&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twansoftwa...). My method was to use App Engine as the callback component to handle Stripe webhooks. I also do have custom server code, which was a little bit tough to get going, but it's great having a dedicated Linux box as well.
- subpixel 11y ago
  Basically, you need a service running on a separate server to implement these sorts of integrations. If Firebase is a long-term part of your stack, I agree that sounds unappealing, b/c the reason you're paying Firebase is so you don't need to wrangle a server. You may think differently if you're using Firebase as the fastest way to get an MVP up and running (that happens to be my use case)
- doczoidberg 11y ago
  Of course you can use firebase also in combination with server side code. It is no reason not to use firebase because you use server side code. I use firebase and SQL at the same time. It works quite good if you know what you do.
andreyf 11y ago
It's not really an alternative to Firebase until you have change notification and a similar scaling model (i.e. scale by throwing money at it).
jondubois 11y ago
I'm not a big fan of offline storage for web apps. Any serious app will quickly exceed the localStorage limit which is only 5mb. I would also question the decision to use HTTP for this purpose instead of WebSockets.
- daleharvey 11y ago
  IndexedDB is not limited to 5MB, its essentially unlimited in Chrome and Firefox. It can be tricky with mobile browsers but they often also have the option of using an unlimited web app wrapper (http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-research/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-researc...) And as for WebSockets, HTTP is easier to debug and experiment with, in my experience the performance difference for the typical use cases is negligible and when needed it is trivial to wrap the communication in a socket.
- striking 11y ago
  WebSockets are for fast, low-overhead connections. If you end up making a new HTTP connection for every update, and there are a lot of updates happening, you should be using WebSockets instead. Otherwise, HTTP works best. It has better tooling and will soon be even faster due to HTTP/2.
  - nojvek 11y ago
    I'm surprised no one mentions xhr streaming, if your pipe is only one way i.e server notifies client, then xhr streaming is quite easy to use and as fast as websockets.
    - striking 11y ago
      I assume most people consider XHR a kind of HTTP request. It is in the name, after all.
- Jx271 11y ago
  It really is a challenge. I don't think it'll be realistic to build mid-size, fully offline web apps (excluding tools like electron) until indexedDB has wider support. One solution is to garbage collect the oldest data from localStorage and sync with a server when you've got connection, but once you're offline you're kinda stuck with 5mb. However, caniuse.com/#feat=indexeddb is optimistic about the future. The company I work for is trying to make offline/decentralized apps more realistic (gundb.io, github.com/amark/gun) and storage limitations can be aggravating at times.
wolframhempel 11y ago
Seems comparable to http://deepstream.io http://deepstream.io
sweetiewill 11y ago
Would have to throw in Couchbase Mobile for comparisons too. It is Open Sourced as well and it provides the offline component with abstraction to sync-ing which is one of the most difficult features/problems it solves. http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/1.1.0/develop/training/build-first-ios-app/index.html http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/1.1.0/de...
fiatjaf 11y ago
Why not CouchDB + PouchDB? It's offline first and replicates over HTTP. For more fine-grained permissions and other features I'm also developing a small Go database compatible with PouchDB at https://github.com/fiatjaf/summadb https://github.com/fiatjaf/summadb I hope it will be able to sync through websockets soon.
- jchrisa 11y ago
  You might be interested in https://github.com/couchbase/sync_gateway https://github.com/couchbase/sync_gateway which is the Couchbase Mobile access control and sync layer (compatible with PouchDB etc). It has fine grained access control based on a channel metaphor. And it's also written in Go, so you might be interested in using parts of it. Specifically if you wrap your storage layer in a facade that looks like https://github.com/couchbaselabs/walrus https://github.com/couchbaselabs/walrus you'll be able to use our suite of storage layers, and we'll be able to use yours. That means it'd be trivial to swap out your storage for something scalable like Couchbase Server, or something tiny and embedded like ForestDB or RocksDB.
  - fiatjaf 11y ago
    Thank you, jchris. As far as I could understand, basically I must implement the Bucket interface[1]? I don't if that will work, since I'm storing things in a somewhat different manner, but it's definitely worth examining. [1]: https://github.com/couchbase/sg-bucket/blob/master/bucket.go https://github.com/couchbase/sg-bucket/blob/master/bucket.go
    - jchrisa 11y ago
      That's right. If you find you enjoy that code... Couchbase is always looking for great engineers!
- MCRed 11y ago
  Or Couchbase + Sync_Gateway + PouchDB / CouchbaseLite? This is a very full featured combination, basically a PaaS/BaaS with sync, and user accounts, out of the box. http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile Note, while that website is very corporate, the software is open source and the company is very supportive of developers.
sktrdie 11y ago
Does anybody know about databases that talk WebSockets rather than HTTP? For frontend apps it seems more logical to use WebSockets. Dealing with AJAX and understanding how to manage all of that on the client is still a huge dilemma in the React/Flux/Angular community.
- fiatjaf 11y ago
  There's https://github.com/nolanlawson/socket-pouch https://github.com/nolanlawson/socket-pouch. It's Node + LevelDB and optionally offline-first.
- brianzelip 11y ago
  RethingDB[0] talks WebSockets. [0]http://rethinkdb.com/ http://rethinkdb.com/
- metasean 11y ago
  GUN defaults to WebSockets - http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ / https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun / https://gitter.im/amark/gun https://gitter.im/amark/gun
- mikaelmorvan 11y ago
  Hi, at zetapush (http://zetapush.com http://zetapush.com), we provide a realtime BaaS with database, file storage, search engine, ... everything with a websocket connection. You can use our javascript SDK to connect to our clusters.
- inlined 11y ago
  Firebase's JavaScript SDK uses WebSockets when available and falls back to HTTPS when unavailable.
jonpaul 11y ago
I'll throw in an article that I wrote about building an open source Firebase clone: http://procbits.com/2014/01/06/poor-mans-firebase-leveldb-rest-and-websockets http://procbits.com/2014/01/06/poor-mans-firebase-leveldb-re... / https://github.com/jprichardson/iceden https://github.com/jprichardson/iceden. Written in Node.js.
jamesw6811 11y ago
For creating a customized web API easily, we are considering http://loopback.io/ http://loopback.io/ and https://www.dreamfactory.com/ https://www.dreamfactory.com/ -- I wonder how these compare to Kinto.
smithclay 11y ago
At this point, are there any major tech organizations who haven't jumped on the Backend-as-a-service bandwagon? Kinto - Mozilla, CloudKit - Apple, Parse - Facebook, Firebase - Google, Azure Mobile Services - Microsoft, Mobile Hub - Amazon, Usergrid - Apache Foundation ... and many, many startups.
avinassh 11y ago
> Kinto is a server allowing you to store and synchronize arbitrary data, attached to your Firefox account. Why does the repo readme says this? What does it mean? I mean, why Parse kinda service is related and attached to Firefox account?
- tarekmoz 11y ago
  It was our first use case at Mozilla when we started the tool. This sentence is now a bit misleading. Thanks for pointing this out.
brodo 11y ago
This isn't really a complete replacement for Parse or Firebase as far as I can see. Apache Usergrid and Baasbox both provide more of the features that Firebase and Parse provide.
estefan 11y ago
If the parse web site wasn't such useless shit I might actually be able to work out whether this really is a good alternative... :-(
ametaireau 11y ago
We put together an answer to the questions that arised in this thread. Hope this helps: http://www.servicedenuages.fr/en/hackernews-feedback http://www.servicedenuages.fr/en/hackernews-feedback

350 points by vladikoff 11y ago

Heh, so last week my buddy Tarek Ziade (one of the developers of this) and I were talking about this (kinto) project he's working on. I asked him what the meaning behind the name was. He said "you know the cloud from Dragon Ball. They don't use it as much in DBZ since they can fly." I asked him if he meant "flying Nimbus?" Apparently, something was lost in translation (I'm in the US, he's in France).

mikexstudios 11y ago
Well, "kinto" is the name for the cloud in Japanese (see: http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/Flying_Nimbus http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/Flying_Nimbus).
tarekmoz 11y ago
Yeah the full name is "Kinto-un" :)

simple10 11y ago

From the Dockerfile [1], it looks like it's built on top of postgres. I'm excited to see if anyone uses Kinto for more than a weekend project. [1] https://github.com/Kinto/kinto/blob/master/Dockerfile https://github.com/Kinto/kinto/blob/master/Dockerfile

rhizome31 11y ago
From the Overview page: At Mozilla, Kinto is used in Firefox and Firefox OS for global synchronization of settings and assets, as well as a first-class solution for personal data in browser extensions and Web apps.

sbarre 11y ago

So I read through the docs for a few minutes and something wasn't entirely clear.. It shows "offline-first design" so does that mean I can use it as a local storage in the browser/device, and it can sync later to a server?

arosequist 11y ago
That's what it looks like [1]. Every operation is done locally via IndexedDB, and then you manually perform syncs. [1] https://kintojs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://kintojs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
- quantisan 11y ago
  Great! We run Firebase in production. Offline-first is one of the most important features for us. (I know, Firebase isn't there yet) I'm surprised this isn't showcased more prominently on their marketing.
  - jamest 11y ago
    Firebase does have offline support for iOS/Android[1]. Web support is coming. [1] https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-05-29-announcing-mobile-offline-support.html https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-05-29-announcing-mobile-o...

chrstphrhrt 11y ago

This looks really cool. Do you have a gitter channel or something? Would love to talk shop about the design decisions! Email me at chris at ramses dot tech. (I'm one of the devs of http://ramses.tech http://ramses.tech)

vladikoff 11y ago
There is an irc channel, join #storage on Mozilla IRC https://search.mibbit.com/networks/Mozilla/%23storage https://search.mibbit.com/networks/Mozilla/%23storage

rbranson 11y ago

Isn't one of the main benefits of something like Firebase or Parse that you don't have to run it? It's nice that Kinto packages the stack together and provides plug-and-play APIs, but there's quite a bit of expertise and overhead operating a backend stack in production.

metasean 11y ago
We're actually building an open-source alternative to services like Firebase and Parse. Ours is a fully peer-to-peer, real-time, graph database that doesn't require a lot of expertise or overhead, and is extensible. http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ / https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun / https://gitter.im/amark/gun https://gitter.im/amark/gun
mxuribe 11y ago
I believe, really, its more about being indie and such. Its the same reason many people can just run gmail - or google apps for your domain - as opposed to the heavy-lifting of running your own email server, etc. Not like I'm an expert, but running one's email - and ensuring high degree of deliverability nowadays - is quite difficult. There are those who choose to run something on their own, maybe to learn, maybe for privacy's sake, etc. I'm sure those who do so, dive in with their eyes wide open. ;-)
aidos 11y ago
Maybe, but there are others of us who don't use firebase because we can't outsource our datastore like that. It goes both ways.
- cristoph 11y ago
  You can use Parse an Firebase to store sensitive data by applying client side encryption. Of course one of the biggest problem is: how do you query that data since it's encrypted. But lately, there are some start-ups that aim to make encryption searchable. See ZeroDB, CryptDB, IQrypt.- the last one is designed to be used for Parse and Firebase: http://iqrypt.com/docs/Home/ http://iqrypt.com/docs/Home/
11y ago

Raed667 11y ago

Looks impressive, but as a Parse user I think that the selling point are the open-sourced SDKs for lots of platforms. EDIT: this seems to be lacking a graphical administration panel as well.

harunurhan 11y ago
I agree with you, but I think SDKs for at least Android and iOS will be available very soon.
maxwin 11y ago
Agree.They should at least have Android and ios SDK.
tarekmoz 11y ago
> this seems to be lacking a graphical administration panel as well we are working on one, that's almost ready. Should be released sometimes during Q1
- Raed667 11y ago
  Great, I'm really excited about testing this on my VPS. Hope it handle the load.
0k1n 11y ago
https://github.com/Kinto/kinto-admin https://github.com/Kinto/kinto-admin
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

vskarine 11y ago

Would be nice if they included RethinkDB in comparison as well

miles_matthias 11y ago

I'm a big fan of services like Parse & Firebase so it's cool to see something open source and independent get released. I've never made the jump to use Parse or Firebase in production though because inevitably I have to write some custom server code to do some integration. For example - payments with Stripe. Charges should only occur on your server (not on the client) but I've yet to see anyone allow you to configure a payment trigger in one of these services.

acgourley 11y ago
We use parse with stripe. The client drives the transaction and then stripe hits your parse cloud function via webhook with the confirmation.
chuinard 11y ago
I've done exactly that - integrated Stripe with our Firebase-backed app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twansoftware.invoicemakerpro&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twansoftwa...). My method was to use App Engine as the callback component to handle Stripe webhooks. I also do have custom server code, which was a little bit tough to get going, but it's great having a dedicated Linux box as well.
subpixel 11y ago
Basically, you need a service running on a separate server to implement these sorts of integrations. If Firebase is a long-term part of your stack, I agree that sounds unappealing, b/c the reason you're paying Firebase is so you don't need to wrangle a server. You may think differently if you're using Firebase as the fastest way to get an MVP up and running (that happens to be my use case)
doczoidberg 11y ago
Of course you can use firebase also in combination with server side code. It is no reason not to use firebase because you use server side code. I use firebase and SQL at the same time. It works quite good if you know what you do.

andreyf 11y ago

It's not really an alternative to Firebase until you have change notification and a similar scaling model (i.e. scale by throwing money at it).

jondubois 11y ago

I'm not a big fan of offline storage for web apps. Any serious app will quickly exceed the localStorage limit which is only 5mb. I would also question the decision to use HTTP for this purpose instead of WebSockets.

daleharvey 11y ago
IndexedDB is not limited to 5MB, its essentially unlimited in Chrome and Firefox. It can be tricky with mobile browsers but they often also have the option of using an unlimited web app wrapper (http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-research/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-researc...) And as for WebSockets, HTTP is easier to debug and experiment with, in my experience the performance difference for the typical use cases is negligible and when needed it is trivial to wrap the communication in a socket.
striking 11y ago
WebSockets are for fast, low-overhead connections. If you end up making a new HTTP connection for every update, and there are a lot of updates happening, you should be using WebSockets instead. Otherwise, HTTP works best. It has better tooling and will soon be even faster due to HTTP/2.
- nojvek 11y ago
  I'm surprised no one mentions xhr streaming, if your pipe is only one way i.e server notifies client, then xhr streaming is quite easy to use and as fast as websockets.
  - striking 11y ago
    I assume most people consider XHR a kind of HTTP request. It is in the name, after all.
Jx271 11y ago
It really is a challenge. I don't think it'll be realistic to build mid-size, fully offline web apps (excluding tools like electron) until indexedDB has wider support. One solution is to garbage collect the oldest data from localStorage and sync with a server when you've got connection, but once you're offline you're kinda stuck with 5mb. However, caniuse.com/#feat=indexeddb is optimistic about the future. The company I work for is trying to make offline/decentralized apps more realistic (gundb.io, github.com/amark/gun) and storage limitations can be aggravating at times.

wolframhempel 11y ago

Seems comparable to http://deepstream.io http://deepstream.io

sweetiewill 11y ago

Would have to throw in Couchbase Mobile for comparisons too. It is Open Sourced as well and it provides the offline component with abstraction to sync-ing which is one of the most difficult features/problems it solves. http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/1.1.0/develop/training/build-first-ios-app/index.html http://developer.couchbase.com/documentation/mobile/1.1.0/de...

fiatjaf 11y ago

Why not CouchDB + PouchDB? It's offline first and replicates over HTTP. For more fine-grained permissions and other features I'm also developing a small Go database compatible with PouchDB at https://github.com/fiatjaf/summadb https://github.com/fiatjaf/summadb I hope it will be able to sync through websockets soon.

jchrisa 11y ago
You might be interested in https://github.com/couchbase/sync_gateway https://github.com/couchbase/sync_gateway which is the Couchbase Mobile access control and sync layer (compatible with PouchDB etc). It has fine grained access control based on a channel metaphor. And it's also written in Go, so you might be interested in using parts of it. Specifically if you wrap your storage layer in a facade that looks like https://github.com/couchbaselabs/walrus https://github.com/couchbaselabs/walrus you'll be able to use our suite of storage layers, and we'll be able to use yours. That means it'd be trivial to swap out your storage for something scalable like Couchbase Server, or something tiny and embedded like ForestDB or RocksDB.
- fiatjaf 11y ago
  Thank you, jchris. As far as I could understand, basically I must implement the Bucket interface[1]? I don't if that will work, since I'm storing things in a somewhat different manner, but it's definitely worth examining. [1]: https://github.com/couchbase/sg-bucket/blob/master/bucket.go https://github.com/couchbase/sg-bucket/blob/master/bucket.go
  - jchrisa 11y ago
    That's right. If you find you enjoy that code... Couchbase is always looking for great engineers!
MCRed 11y ago
Or Couchbase + Sync_Gateway + PouchDB / CouchbaseLite? This is a very full featured combination, basically a PaaS/BaaS with sync, and user accounts, out of the box. http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile Note, while that website is very corporate, the software is open source and the company is very supportive of developers.

sktrdie 11y ago

Does anybody know about databases that talk WebSockets rather than HTTP? For frontend apps it seems more logical to use WebSockets. Dealing with AJAX and understanding how to manage all of that on the client is still a huge dilemma in the React/Flux/Angular community.

fiatjaf 11y ago
There's https://github.com/nolanlawson/socket-pouch https://github.com/nolanlawson/socket-pouch. It's Node + LevelDB and optionally offline-first.
brianzelip 11y ago
RethingDB[0] talks WebSockets. [0]http://rethinkdb.com/ http://rethinkdb.com/
metasean 11y ago
GUN defaults to WebSockets - http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ / https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun / https://gitter.im/amark/gun https://gitter.im/amark/gun
mikaelmorvan 11y ago
Hi, at zetapush (http://zetapush.com http://zetapush.com), we provide a realtime BaaS with database, file storage, search engine, ... everything with a websocket connection. You can use our javascript SDK to connect to our clusters.
inlined 11y ago
Firebase's JavaScript SDK uses WebSockets when available and falls back to HTTPS when unavailable.

jonpaul 11y ago

I'll throw in an article that I wrote about building an open source Firebase clone: http://procbits.com/2014/01/06/poor-mans-firebase-leveldb-rest-and-websockets http://procbits.com/2014/01/06/poor-mans-firebase-leveldb-re... / https://github.com/jprichardson/iceden https://github.com/jprichardson/iceden. Written in Node.js.

jamesw6811 11y ago

For creating a customized web API easily, we are considering http://loopback.io/ http://loopback.io/ and https://www.dreamfactory.com/ https://www.dreamfactory.com/ -- I wonder how these compare to Kinto.

smithclay 11y ago

At this point, are there any major tech organizations who haven't jumped on the Backend-as-a-service bandwagon? Kinto - Mozilla, CloudKit - Apple, Parse - Facebook, Firebase - Google, Azure Mobile Services - Microsoft, Mobile Hub - Amazon, Usergrid - Apache Foundation ... and many, many startups.

avinassh 11y ago

> Kinto is a server allowing you to store and synchronize arbitrary data, attached to your Firefox account. Why does the repo readme says this? What does it mean? I mean, why Parse kinda service is related and attached to Firefox account?

tarekmoz 11y ago
It was our first use case at Mozilla when we started the tool. This sentence is now a bit misleading. Thanks for pointing this out.

brodo 11y ago

This isn't really a complete replacement for Parse or Firebase as far as I can see. Apache Usergrid and Baasbox both provide more of the features that Firebase and Parse provide.

estefan 11y ago

If the parse web site wasn't such useless shit I might actually be able to work out whether this really is a good alternative... :-(

ametaireau 11y ago

We put together an answer to the questions that arised in this thread. Hope this helps: http://www.servicedenuages.fr/en/hackernews-feedback http://www.servicedenuages.fr/en/hackernews-feedback