Parse, Firebase and the comeback of Two-Tier

http://ksat.me/comeback-of-thick-clients/

by ksat • 14 years ago

40 4 14 years ago

hkarthik• 14 years ago

Having done my time in "two tier" stacks, I would argue the biggest disadvantage they bring is challenges with testing. This could be unit, integration, or just manual acceptance testing.

Having to spin up a separate environment or mock EVERYTHING leads to testing friction which in turn leads to testing simply not being done. If you stop testing, it's hard to maintain a consistent level of quality with your software, especially as it grows and you bring on new developers.

That being said, I appreciate the turn-key ease of use with services like Parse. If they solve the local development/multi environment issue for testing, I'd be more apt to use something like it and avoid the administrative headache of maintaining a backend infrastructure.

Void_• 14 years ago

And Meteor and Simperium.

DanielShir• 14 years ago

`Now, Since old is the new new...`

I remember one of the old timers at my former company saying the exact same thing. Something along the lines that Facebook is the new Usenet.

shykes• 14 years ago

"forget server code" comes at a price: tying yourself to a 3d-party proprietary user database for security. That will be an acceptable tradeoff only for some developers... but not the kind with a lot of money to spend. As they start worrying about revenue I predict that the Parse and Firebase of the world will have no choice but to allow execution of arbitrary server-side validation... so much for "forget server code".

Parse, Firebase and the comeback of Two-Tier

Related Stories