7 ms·
Helios
- prezjordan 14y agoI swear, Mattt must code for 40 hours a day. The sheer quantity (and quality!) of his ships is mind-boggling. This looks fantastic, I'll definitely be checking this out!
- Gertig 14y agoAfter reading the first two paragraphs I thought that this has to be mattt! The man is a machine.
- marcomonteiro 14y agoSame. I think I've read every post in NSHipster at least twice.
- thiagoperes 14y agoI don't know how Apple didn't hired this guy yet. He should've been running the iCloud and Framework teams!
- applecore 14y agoHis latest work on NSHipster is great too: http://nshipster.com/icloud/ http://nshipster.com/icloud/
- ryderm 14y agoI havn't done enough iOS to really speak intelligently about it, but this looks like a great place to start without limiting flexibility. Although "an extensible open-source mobile backend framework" seems to say that it also applies to non iOS, it doesn't seem that it does. Is it more suited for iOS, or iOS only?
- dirtyaura 14y agoMany services that Helios provides are either iOS specific backend integrations (Push Notifications & Store Kit transaction verifications) or has client-side components (A/B testing, better client-side networking libraries)
- keeran 14y agoGood to see some potential (and OSS!) competition for Parse :)
- bdotdub 14y agoThis looks awesome - a Parse.com you can deploy yourself!
- kiernan 14y agoAlso check this one out then, similar but with no mobile client SDK (other than a javascript): http://deployd.com http://deployd.com
- coob 14y agoI've recently been working on a Node backend for IAP verification and providing signed S3 URLs for downloadable content - something like this would have halved the time it took. Good work Matt!
- julien_c 14y agoInteresting – I'm thinking about implementing something just like that right now. Did you find good resources about this?
- saddino 14y agoI've been thinking that Parse (and StackMob, Kinvey et al) need to provide a similar self-deployable solution at a reasonable price; this might be the motivation they need to do so.
- tenfourty 14y agoThis might cannibalise their business model in such an undeveloped market, they are all about lock in currently. There is definitely space in the market for an open source based MBaaS/BaaS that allows you to roll your own or use their hosted version.
- nathan_long 14y agoI'm impressed that the name includes the substring "iOS".
- Gertig 14y agoReally looking forward to trying this out, owning your data definitely goes a long way.
- juanbyrge 14y agoNICE!!! So much better than parse
- pasbesoin 14y agoJust FYI, Helios Software Solutions in England is the maker of the longstanding and widely distributed TextPad text editor for Windows. In case this would present a potential name conflict. (I don't know -- just mentioning.) http://www.textpad.com/ http://www.textpad.com/ http://www.textpad.com/contact/index.html http://www.textpad.com/contact/index.html
- BHSPitMonkey 14y agoI don't get the impression that these projects are at risk of being mentioned in the same scope.
- dracoli 14y agoThis is really nice. Huge time saver for apps that only need a basic backend for certain functionalities. Can this potentially also work for other mobile platforms?
- andrewljohnson 14y agoNeat, I already use mattt's CLI tool for interfacing with the Apple dev site: https://github.com/mattt/cupertino https://github.com/mattt/cupertino
- myko 14y agoWow, this is amazing! My least favorite part of iOS dev is visiting the horrendous dev portal. Thanks for the link.
- missenlinx 14y agoReally cool! I hated that website. Thanks
- panzerboy 14y agoCool, didn't even know about that one. Installed, thanks!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- neya 14y agoWow, Thank you SO MUCH! Admittedly, this is one of the best things that ever happened to open source w.r.t mobile development in the last few months!
- miles_matthias 14y agoIt's really awesome to see Heroku getting into the mobile BaaS industry. I think they have a lot of expertise that they can lend and I'm even more excited that the project is open source, free, and deployable. Looking forward to using this!
- tamersalama 14y agoCan't wait to integrated clients with RubyMotion
- obilgic 14y agoThis is basically a combination of these four gems: https://github.com/mattt/rack-in-app-purchase https://github.com/mattt/rack-core-data https://github.com/mattt/rack-passbook https://github.com/mattt/rack-push-notification That is why codebase looks very clean and simple.
- scoot 14y agoThat amounts to saying mattt is a machine because mattt is a machine. Building on the shoulders of... himself!
- iandanforth 14y agoThis looks wonderful, thanks for all the hard work! I hope this expands to encompass other platforms and languages.
- morefranco 14y agoBeautiful.
- mchristoff 14y agoandroid support coming?
- lnanek2 14y agoWow, iOS only when Android is 75% shipping smartphones?
- BillySquid 14y agois really hard to release a new product running for both environments in the first try. Give it some time for android.
- phil 14y agoYou should totally submit a pull request adding Android support!
- jarjoura 14y agoMixPanel reports 60% iOS vs 40% Android split when actual app usage comes into the mix. Probably why backend frameworks specialize in iOS first.
- an0nym0usc0ward 14y ago.
- MrUnderhill 14y agoOff topic: The ultra light custom fonts a lot of websites use nowadays (looks like "Bariol" on this site), do they look bad to anyone other than me? Both in Firefox and Opera (Linux) many of the lines are invisible or barely visible (example: http://i.imgur.com/Yk0Q83G.png http://i.imgur.com/Yk0Q83G.png ). In Chrome they look a little bit better.
- nekopa 14y agoOn my iPad all the letter 'D's have disappeared. It's quite disconcerting.
- evolve2k 14y agoSame on my iPhone, all the 'd' characters don't show up properly at all. Had to read the article zoomed right up so that the spider thin d characters were visible at all. Please change the font.
- no_gravity 14y agoI was wondering the same. Waiting for Browsershots to render the page in different browsers: http://browsershots.org/http://helios.io/ http://browsershots.org/http://helios.io/
- julien_c 14y agoLooks great in Mac OS.
- nathos 14y agoIn my experience, the issues w/ thin font weights tend to be worse on Windows & Linux. Worth keeping in mind if you're using these fonts (particularly if you're using some of the free fonts from Google Web Fonts that aren't necessarily well-hinted)
- grinich 14y agoLooks like your browser isn't properly doing sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
- degenerate 14y agoHelios is also the moniker of a very "cloud-like" (ambient) composer named Keith Kenniff. His music is excellent for coding when you need that superior downtempo thinking background noise. My favorite album: https://soundcloud.com/_type/sets/helios-eingya https://soundcloud.com/_type/sets/helios-eingya His soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff
- publicfig 14y agoWhile we're discussing him, it's worth checking out another project of his, Goldmund. It's piano centric music that really embraces the minimalist aspects of some of the newer neo-classical artists (think Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter, Nils Frahm or Dustin O'Halloran). A lot of the music is on Spotify, and here's a link to a set of it on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff/sets/goldmund https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff/sets/goldmund
- usmanity 14y agoI had no idea Helios is also Goldmund. The sound is so different. I found them both on Spotify.
- hellotoby 14y agoJust listened to this. If you like this kind of ambient music then I recommend you take a look at the works by Geotic. http://www.angelfire.com/indie/postfoetus/geotic.html http://www.angelfire.com/indie/postfoetus/geotic.html
- degenerate 14y agoTried it, liked it, donated. Thanks! (also emailed him to tell him about a few broken links to his album downloads)
- kreek 14y agoI thought the same thing when I saw this. Even if you haven't heard of Helios you've probably heard Keith's music on TV or online. The website for his film, tv, and ad work is http://www.unseen-music.com/ http://www.unseen-music.com/
- mtp0101 14y agoWhy would they name their application Helios? It collides with Eclipse.
- m2mapps 14y agoThis is really great. A massive limitation of Parse.com is with their Javascript SDK - you have to expose your app keys to the client and the SDK doesn't work at all on any version of IE unless you have SSL enabled.
- adelevie 14y ago1) There are Access Control Lists which should help with that. Also, note that Parse gives you a Javascript key which is separate from your master key. Though I'm a longtime Parse user, I have not spent much time with the JS SDK on the client (as opposed to Cloud Code, where no keys are exposed), so I can't really say that this just "solves the problem." 2) Wouldn't any similarly-situated Javascript library face the same problems, with Access Control Lists probably being the most practical solution? 3) Moreover, with any mobile backend, you must assume that the keys that ship within the code of your native app will be public. So you should be using Access Control Lists if you're using the iOS SDK, for example.
- lgleason 14y agoIt is a great start. The passbook implementation looks to be basic right now. I would love to be able to combine this with https://github.com/frozon/passbook https://github.com/frozon/passbook for passbook support and git@github.com:grocer/grocer.git for push notifications. The code would have better test coverage and more people to support the project.
- attheodo 14y agoMobile backends is definitely a hot topic nowadays and this is one of the greatest contributions. A small part of me wishes it was a more "Pythonic" though.. :)
- healthenclave 14y agoGuyz Do we have something similar for Django ? Or maybe a template of pre-written code for Tastypie ??
- namuol 14y agoDoes this specifically cater to iOS or can it act as a more general-purpose backend service like Parse.com?
- parrots 14y agoI've been debating using something like Parse or Azure as a backend, and this looks like a nice alternative as I'm usually a roll-your-own-solution kinda guy. But I worry about how it would hold up in terms of performance, given this recent benchmarking fest featured on HN. http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/framework-benchmarks/ http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/framework-benchma...
- lgleason 14y agoIt depends on the number of transactions you are likely to see on your system. I love ruby, but there are areas where it begins to fall down.
- wenfeixiang 14y agogood job, i want to try it
- lennydizzy 14y agoIs there any similar product for Clojure?
- Kiro 14y agoHow do they put the rocket in the title like that?
- Aqua_Geek 14y agoIt's a Unicode character (U+1F680).
- known 14y agoBrilliant
- maximegarcia 14y agoSaw Mattt and his Helios project at Paris.rb meetup yesterday evening. Quite interesting :) I wondered in the subway while coming back home if Helios helps to sync backend-made changes to the app through push notifications, in an automagically fashion.
- troels 14y agoNot to rain on the parade, but I just got started with ios and I gave up on getting AFIncrementalStore to work properly. RestKit looks much more solid to me. Can any actual ios developers (e.g. someone with more than 14 days of experience) comment on that?