Parse Launches Web Apps with the Express Web Framework

http://blog.parse.com/2013/06/04/building-parse-web-apps-with-the-express-web-framework/

by stanleyw • 13 years ago

92 44 13 years ago

blog.parse.com

tehwebguy3• 13 years ago

Seeing as I've used Heroku mostly for Express apps this sounds appealing to me.

There does not seem to be support for anything like Procfile or package.json / npm, though.

kwhinnery• 13 years ago

Parse doesn't provide a node.js environment. It's a custom V8 runtime environment, with commonjs and node-like modules. It's really neat, but it will be interesting to see how they maintain/extend a "node like" environment that's not really node. They run the risk of confusing developers who expect to do anything they can do in node.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

Wow, it's interesting to see how these data in the cloud services are backing into custom code, instead of starting with custom code hosting and backing into more of a PAAS approach.

JeanSebTr• 13 years ago

So, it's nodejs hosting with the only dependency available being expressjs. Seems very restrictive.

bdcravens• 13 years ago

The idea of course is that you'll use Parse for your datastore, authentication, etc. For a number of use cases Express + Parse API is fully adequate.

hidden-markov• 13 years ago

Could someone please explain me, how they are different from any other cloud PaaS?

JoshGlazebrook• 13 years ago

More expensive and less features.

mosselman• 13 years ago

So many 'new' technologies to play with, so little time :(. These are awesome web dev times we are living in.

davidbrent• 13 years ago

Can someone translate this for me? I'm not sure what it would mean to have 'Parse Hosting', 'Cloud Code', etc... I've only recently started to learn nodejs and didn't have any trouble pushing my tutorial made app to Heroku. Is this just an alternative to Heroku that hosts your app?

jonny_eh• 13 years ago

It think it's just an easier way for Parse users to do server-side rendering of their single-pag apps. To be honest, I don't even think that's right.

They're coming out with all these interested disparate services, they need to provide a coherent story for how developers can use them together. Maybe a sample app or two.

tehwebguy3• 13 years ago

They posted two sample apps on the article:

AnyBlog: http://www.anyblog.co

Source: https://github.com/ParsePlatform/AnyBlog

AnyMeme: http://www.anymeme.org

Source: https://github.com/ParsePlatform/AnyMeme

tehwebguy3• 13 years ago

It sounds like you've nailed it. This has fewer features, but if you use Parse's data storage (which is their primary product) you probably have improved performance since your data and app are presumably nearby.

crabasa• 13 years ago

It seems that, one by one, the MBaaS players are realizing that in order to be "complete" solutions they need to offer the ability to execute arbitrary code on the server. You can see examples of this for Kinvey [1], Azure Mobile Services [2] and Cloudmine [3].

Of course, they all do is slightly differently, and there is generally more sandboxing than what you would expect from a traditional PaaS like Heroku. The danger is that by being more complete, they lose focus on their original mission: to bring powerful app-centric functionality to traditional client-side developers.

[1] http://devcenter.kinvey.com/nodejs/guides/business-logic

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj55422...

[3] https://cloudmine.me/docs/servercode/javascript

ilaksh6• 13 years ago

I have a solution: drop the normal VM-based servers and instead use WebRTC or some other peer technology so the client (browsers or whatever) talk to eachother directly.

Unworkable because of security you say? Add encryption.

I actually think that not too many years down the line this type of thing will be common.

rjvir3• 13 years ago

Sometimes, companies like Parse make me think having quality backend engineers is unnecessary for a startup. AWS made it cheaper to run scalable applications, Heroku made dev ops ridiculously easy, and Parse may eliminate the need for backend engineers. The outcry against Parse amongst some of friends who are backend developers is reminiscent of factory workers who feared the advent of machines.

flyosity• 13 years ago

As a designer who builds out a lot of early prototypes for testing, Parse is really amazing. Previously I'd do some localStorage hacks to store simple data for prototype demos but since it was just on one machine it was really limited. Now I use Parse for all mock backends and can "mock" entire user authentication flows, objects being created/edited/saved, first-use state (no objects), secondary use state, error and success messages, the whole thing. I put "mock" in quotes because my prototypes are now essentially MVPs with real data being stored and accessed. It's pretty incredible.

mhd• 13 years ago

Or when MS Access came out and that was the last we ever saw of DBAs.

apalmer2• 13 years ago

Wait what? I think your going a bit far there.

I mean for prototypes, proof of concepts, and maybe 2 man fly by night 'startups' trying to get initially backing to hire backend engineers, great idea. I can even see certain 'startups' may be profitable and sustainable and just never need to invest in 'custom' backend code.

But as a general rule of thumb, in no way should software startups that base their existence on client server software possibly think its a good idea to have no one in house who actually knows how to do server software.

rjvir3• 13 years ago

Obviously, startups need to scale at some point, and to do that they need experienced backend engineers. However, when a startup is still searching for product-market fit and doesn't have an influx of users, it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time and effort attempting to build a scalable backend that probably won't scale anyways. With cloud code and now integration with Express, there are almost no performance tradeoffs to using Parse for most early stage startups.

benologist4• 13 years ago

PaaS and services like Parse are the next normal. The work you're describing is called manual labor and where possible (aka the 99% use-case) it will be replaced by better technology.

MetaCosm2• 13 years ago

There is an outcry against Parse? Seriously? As a back-end engineer, I always thought it was a clever niche product and I was happy (but a bit fearful) when they got acquired by facebook. Nice to see they are still trying to innovate.

jcoder• 13 years ago

The factory workers feared machines because the machines could precisely replicate their efforts. If backend engineering efforts were replaceable with a one-size-fits-all API like Parse, I already would be out of work (instead, everyone is hiring). Parse looks great for a client-driven project that essentially needs storage and some transformation, but I'm no more fearful of it than a good designer is fearful of Bootstrap.

zgohr• 13 years ago

Foreseeable roadmap for Web Sockets?

ilaksh6• 13 years ago

I believe that within a few years most of the JavaScript programmers out there who are afraid of VMs are going to realize that it really isn't that hard to deploy Node (or anything else for that matter) to Linode, Rackspace, Digital Ocean or AWS.

Until then, they will continue to pay crazy markups to Heroku or live with limitations like with the new Parse service that doesn't let you install any Node packages (there are 31000 and counting now in the npm registry https://npmjs.org/).

Linode even has a StackScript that sets up Node for you. And AWS has something similar with a Node AMI (in the marketplace at least). Or you could just copy paste like 10 lines of code from the Node.js wiki. Or find a script online to do it.

I would honestly like to know what is it that, say for example Parse, has done with their VM configuration that is so much more sophisticated than what people could get from following a few wiki pages on the web, or just getting a good bash script. Because I doubt that there are a lot of extra security or performance features or anything like that.

Configuring and running an Ubuntu server is not that hard.

But maybe it is. Maybe I am just really ignorant and there is some kind of complex configuration or tuning or firewall or daily task that Parse or some other Node.js hosting company is running on their servers that is completely beyond me or that I would never be able to find out about from the web. But I think that for 95% of people nothing complicated is really required.

I really appreciate any hints about Linux server management to clue me in if there are a lot of commands that I should be running on my servers that I am not aware of.

What I know is that my Ubuntu Node servers get running and stay up without me entering a lot of commands or doing a lot of monitoring or anything else.

If you go with AWS, they have a built in interface for the firewall in the browser. You don't even have to use a command line. Although honestly in Ubuntu how hard is sudo ufw enable; sudo ufw allow [port]

meritt• 13 years ago

All those services you mentioned aren't event-driven asynchronous which is an important part of node's ability to reach webscale.

ilaksh6• 13 years ago

LOL are you serious?

What on earth are you talking about? Maybe you are kidding.

But if you're not kidding.. are you saying that those VPS providers like AWS, Digital Ocean and Linode are not 'event-driven asynchronous'? Wat?? VMs run whatever code you want, asynchronous or synchronous or whatever.

I think you must be messing with me. Especially since you put 'webscale' on the end of that.

HAHA.

benologist4• 13 years ago

It's not hard to install nodejs, and then you need forever or w/e to keep it running, you need that to start on boot, you need pingdom or whatever to monitor it, you need your haproxy or nginx for load balancing, you need to decide what to log and how to store those files beyond megabytes, maybe you need ssl, you need a way to get the next version running, and you need to be able to fix it when stuff goes wrong.

All of those things are just distractions from whatever your project really is. Are you building software or are you dicking around with servers?

ilaksh6• 13 years ago

99% of Node applications do not need any load balancing. 1% are Twitter or something. And even a lot of the 1% would do it at the application layer using multiple VMs.

And I bet that most of the Heroku apps on Node that use multiple dynos really only need multiple dynos because Heroku's dyno isn't giving them realistic resources on the dynos, i.e. less than one small AWS or Linode or whatever.

Forever will not keep your Node application running. If you Node application crashes, forever will let it crash, and then run it again, and if it crashes again, it will run it again, and it will crash again.

There used to be basic gotchas in HTTP/Express that made it really easy to have an exception thrown that would take down a Node web server. I am not sure those are already there, but anyway I do what every Node expert advises against and include and uncaughtException handler in my Node web servers. That keeps them running. If I take it out, the effect is that they go down briefly, and forever restarts them. So honestly I see no benefit in most cases to using forever except to make it a little bit harder to figure out how launch your application.

And the thing with automatically restarting when a server reboots, honestly my servers very rarely reboot. If they are going to reboot then the VM (VPS) provider gives me warning and lets me control it. So for 99% of applications out there, an upstart or whatever to restart your Node application really isn't that important.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to install nginx in front of every Node application.

I will give you the SSL one, that could easily take a good UI developer 2 or 3 days to find the right instructions on Google.

eddieroger• 13 years ago

Setting up and running an Ubuntu instance somewhere isn't hard, but sysadmining is. I think people who pay for Heroku (as I have in the past) are throwing money at a problem. Even suggesting blindly to use "sudo ufw allow [port]" kind of proves this - what ports do they allow? I allowed 80 because web, but now I can't SSH back in to my box. Also, updates? Security patches? Heaven forbid my node app gets popular and now I have to scale.

In other words, it's like the game of Othello - a minute to learn, a lifetime to master. Some people just want to develop.

ilaksh6• 13 years ago

Allow ports 80, 443 and 22.

Do you really think that Parse is doing all of the security updates that come through Ubuntu or CentOS? Is Heroku doing all of them? I doubt it.

And if someone needs to do a security update on Ubuntu, its a one liner.

99% of the Node apps out there will not need more than one VM or any complicated scaling. Or they can scale horizontally at the application level using more VMs, or vertically by just upgrading their VM to have more RAM/VCPUs.

From Heroku's site: "New systems are deployed with the latest updates, security fixes, and Heroku configurations and existing systems are decommissioned as customers are migrated to the new instances. This process allows Heroku to keep the environment up-to-date. Since customer applications run in isolated environments, they are unaffected by these core system updates."

Which means they do not apply security updates. They decommission servers if they think its necessary. How many times has Heroku actually done this? I am sure it is not with every security update.

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

Sure it's not hard to spin up a Node process on a VM, but the abstractions Heroku provides are pretty nice: "git push" to deploy, Procfile to define process types, a simple command line tool for tailing logs, scaling processes, set environment variables to configure, etc.

Plus you need to know a bunch of stuff about sysadmining to properly secure the server, stay on top of security patches, etc.

jwilliams• 13 years ago

If you're in the AWS eco-system you can consider OpsWorks -- which is much closer to a full PaaS.

yoshyosh• 13 years ago

2 years ago I taught myself how to code and design. Figuring out how to set up my environment alone almost killed me. There were just so many cryptic commands that had to be done that weren't exactly english. Then I found the Rails 1 click installer, and it literally did just that. Next I saw the beauty of git push heroku master. Now my page was on the web. It was amazing. To seasoned programmers it might not seem that difficult, but to those who are entering this new world, a few steps and a wiki can start to get confusing, especially if something goes wrong or the person skips a step. Overall the environments for code still have bad UX and I can't wait till someone makes it as easy as the 1 click experience I had.

ilaksh6• 13 years ago

Ok but what I'm saying is that the UIs for the VPSs are really simple and some of them actually have a way to select a VM with Node already installed or automatically run a script that installs it. Its actually easier than Heroku.

Also if you just had a good bash script from somewhere, that would be easier than Heroku too.

Just basically saying that the right script or server image is all you need rather than paying twice or 10x as much money for something you can't control.

raingrove• 13 years ago

We just blogged about how you can build a Parse web app with the Express web framework within the browser.

http://blog.nitrous.io/2013/06/04/build-parse-web-apps-in-th...

We're still in private beta, but we will be moving to public beta very soon. If you want an invite sooner, ping us on Twitter at @NitrousIO.

Parse Launches Web Apps with the Express Web Framework

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