I kind of dislike the fact that proven platform-supplied facilities like Core Data and the wonderful NSPredicate-Stuff isn't used ( from what I've read on the parse.com homepage ). Building an whole app around a proprietary framework, thereby abandoning the standard stuff wouldn't have been an option for too many projects I've done..
It's good practice to keep your network data model somewhat isolated anyway. For my projects, I'm creating a Core Data model to match the Parse object data model, and running everything off that, using the Parse objects to keep the CD up to date. That way, I have device-local copies of all app data, and if I need to change backends in the future I only need to replace the isolated Parse code.
As an iOS developer, Parse is the thing I'm most excited about working with this year. It's been really great to not have to worry about building a whole web service to handle shared data. Thanks guys!
I think parse is great... but seriously all your data with them???... and even if they give you back your data, can we make sense of it to write our own library? I just feel that it probably takes equal time (or may be little more) to write your own backend. Plenty of sample code out there, I wrote it in php and mysql even without any prior experience in php. And dont you have to learn parse platform to get it going in first place? then why not just write our own backend?
Personally, I like that I can spin up a backend for a project without needing to worry about knowing PHP/Rails/Django/MySQL/PostgreSQL/etc. It just makes it that much easier to get a minimum product out the door. If the day comes when I need to migrate that product to something homegrown, I can do that, but it's a lot easier to start with Parse for now.
As for learning its platform, there isn't much to learn, really. If you're familiar with iOS development (or Android), it's dead simple. I learned like 90% of it in an hour or two, reading through the quickstart guide and the docs.
The PFObject class alone allows me to do work in minutes that used to take hours with server setup. Also, great classes like this UITableViewController subclass are always being released.
The only thing better than this platform, is the team running it. They are taking the time to do the little things and build a great product. They answer each email they receive, they genuinely listen to user feedback, and they are always looking for new ways push the platform forward.
I am with @Skroob on this one. This is one product I look forward to using the most in 2012.
PS- If you are worried data only on a remote server, you can always serialize the object and store it in a flat file or mirror it over to a NSManagedObject and store it in CoreData.
