4 ms·
I'll still keep shilling Parse Server + Parse Dashboard for back end. It's open source, it plugs into MongoDB, which is very scalable for when the day comes to
by muzani 2y ago
I'll still keep shilling Parse Server + Parse Dashboard for back end. It's open source, it plugs into MongoDB, which is very scalable for when the day comes to replace it with something else. It has things like auth, password reset, cloud functions, etc built in, and there's tutorials for email adapters. It does much of the things you can do on Firebase, but easier and cheaper.
Dealing with the DB is extremely easy too - it handles relations within databases, queries, and the UI of Parse Dashboard is simple like your regular online spreadsheets. It's very easy to normalize DBs and all that.
Old article I wrote on how to set it up in half an hour: https://smuzani.medium.com/setting-up-a-mobile-backend-server-in-half-an-hour-f1b13e88092c https://smuzani.medium.com/setting-up-a-mobile-backend-serve...
For front end, JS + jQuery + Bootstrap works fine for basic interactive experiences.
You probably don't need React level stuff unless you're building a social media site or similar. One of the advantages of React is that it's easy to communicate what's happening to team members without documentation, but this is unneeded if you're solo.
There's disadvantages though - you have to optimize things like all your JS files, and handle reloading from cache when you've updated a JS file. There's no "clean" or "modular" code; if you made a bar like the " new | threads | past ..." the top of this page, you use find and replace. But I have sites that run perfectly fine for years on this, without much issue in maintenance.
Another bonus with simple HTML+CSS+jQuery+Bootstrap is that you can also host it on some really cheap servers. Netlify is free at first, but it does not scale well to say, 10k visits/day.
- cweagans 2y agoYou might be interested in Pocketbase. Lots of overlap. It’s really good.
- muzani 2y agoOh, this is nice! Thanks for the recommendation! On a glance, it looks like Pocket Base is easier and faster to set up but Parse Server might scale better, just because it's tied in with MongoDB by default. SQLite is an interesting choice, but 10k persistent real time connections is pretty much near the point where you should be hiring someone to scale it up. Supporting Google login out of the box is a major plus, and the dashboard works great on mobile.
- balder1991 2y agoAt least it seems not to need 600 dependencies like Parse Server does.
- balder1991 2y agoI gotta say, back when I worked in an old company they built a service for a client using Parse Server that still works great today, although nowadays it is fully self hosted. It has its limitations, but it’s a good abstraction for simple use cases, and it handles a lot of traffic without problems.
- muzani 2y agoWhat do you mean by fully self hosted? Not on heroku? On a physical server? Some confuse it with Parse, which ran on their PaaS, before it was open sourced. I do like it as a middle "low code option" as opposed to the complex no code options like Wordpress or doing the whole stack to build something that might not even sell. Honestly, Firebase has caught up to it in development speed and documentation, but Firebase feels ironically less scalable.
- balder1991 2y agoI meant they have an AWS instance with Parse Server running nowadays. It currently deals with a lot of government parking services in the southeast of Brazil. Kinda cool to see it keep existing so far, and I have a friend who managed to keep it reasonably updated with the current version of Parse Server.