protobuf-rules-gen VS parse-server

1) Create my data model using https://github.com/FirebaseExtended/protobuf-rules-gen to assist creating more portable resources

A long time ago, I was the PM on Firestore security rules, which was intended to solve both of those issues.

https://github.com/FirebaseExtended/protobuf-rules-gen was the closest we got: declaring types as protobufs (because Google, of course) and then generating both security rules to guarantee validity as well as client types that would match. I wanted to add proto annotations to do additional validity (e.g. add a regex to validate the phone number string was correct, do length checks on strings, etc.).

The short answer is that backend rules engines, either in their own DSL or bolted on to e.g. SQL, are pretty tough to get right, and have a super steep learning curve. IMO, AWS API Gateway with Lambda Authorizers get this most correct.

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/