envelop VS parse-server

The Guild took over the development of GraphQL Yoga from Prisma in early 2021, and with the growing community of tools in the GraphQL space, most recently Envelop, we were able to rewrite GraphQL Yoga 2.0 from scratch with easy setup, performance, and developer experience at the core.

Ideally, you already have your basic envelop setup with your http framework of choice. This guide we will be based on the graphql-helix fastify example, but the code can be easily transferred to any other example as listed on our Integrations and Examples documentation. In case you are hitting any roadblocks feel free to reach out to us via the chat box on this page! The full code of the end-result is also available in our examples graphql-helix-auth0 fastify example.

Make “hard” GraphQL capabilities easy by installing powerful plugins (Caching, Tracing with Prometheus/DataDog/NewRelic/Sentry/OpenTelemetry/ApolloTracing, Loggers, GraphQL-Jit, Persisted Operations, Security with rate-limit/depth-limit/Auth0 and many others from the Plugins Hub)

I started reimplementing the logic from GitHub over here https://github.com/dotansimha/envelop/pull/474

We just today published a new plugin for envelop (GraphQL execution flow customization layer) that allow rejecting GraphQL operations before being executed based on the selection set of the operation. It is pretty flexible and you can limit the access dynamically based on the GraphQL context. E.g. this allows loading the permission information from the database, the user record, or any other remote service. https://github.com/dotansimha/envelop/tree/main/packages/plugins/operation-field-permissions

We are already having a spec compatible implementation available that you can start using with envelop, without havign to wait for official graphql-js support to land: https://github.com/dotansimha/envelop/pull/179

Backend as a Service (BaaS) goes back to early 2010’s with companies like Parse and Firebase. These products integrated everything a backend provides to a webapp in a single, integrated package that makes it easier to get started and enables you to offload some of the devops maintenance work to someone else.

Prototype Pollution Fix

Parse Server is a great way to quickly spin up a backend for your project. Parse is a Node based utility that sits on top of ExpressJS.

Parse

You can try https://parseplatform.org/, it is self-hosted if you need. And also there are a number of cloud services with compatible API, like https://www.back4app.com/ It has dart-friendly generated API client, much simpler than firebase and is built on top of postgresql and mongodb.

Parse - https://parseplatform.org/

Not to crash the party or anything. Supabase is great and all but in terms of feature completeness and getting actual products built, it doesn't come close to Parse[0].

Same with Appwrite. Both of these are very popular but they either lack essential features or have them behind a subscription wall. For example, the OSS version of Supabase (last I checked) doesn't include the edge functions which are really important for easily computing stuff on the server side. Parse on the other hand is 100% open source and has a huge feature set. It's older than all of these lo-code tools and actually helps solve the issues one comes across when using such tools.

Another thing is extending these tools which is a pain. For example, Parse supports multiple databases by default (postgres & MongoDB) and the ability to write a custom adapter if you need something else. Similarly, if you at any point need to go 100% custom it also makes that possible so you are never locked in. These tools however don't have that level of low-level control and are general all or nothing kind of tools best for small-to-medium sized problems which don't have a lot of room to grow.

But both of these (Appwrite & Supabase) are super markety. Appwrite is all over the place with their ads, Supabase got a huge trend when it launched etc. Parse on the other hand is not too good at marketing their product being fully community run which is one reason not many know of it. Another is their not-so-fancy docs.

I have no stake in any of these products: just my conclusion after having tried all of these.

[0] https://parseplatform.org/