Monthly Archives: August 2012

Counters have long been an important tool in Parse’s iOS and Android client SDKs. They allow you to increase a value on the server without worrying that two clients might be saving at the same time and overwrite each other’s values.

Likewise, Atomic Array Operations allow multiple clients to add elements to an array without clobbering each other’s work. These valuable features have now been added to the JavaScript SDK as well. Before:

seanBean.set("onScreenDeathCount",
             seanBean.get("onScreenDeathCount") + 1);
seanBean.set("onScreenDeathMovies",
             seanBean.get("onScreenDeathMovies").concat("GoldenEye"));

// If another character played by Sean Bean dies before we save
// (which is likely), he might get overwritten!
seanBean.save(...);

After:

seanBean.increment("onScreenDeathCount", 1);
seanBean.add("onScreenDeathMovies", "GoldenEye");

// We can relax knowing that every on-screen death will be catalogued.
seanBean.save(...);

For more information on this and other amazing Parse.Object capabilities, check out our JavaScript API reference.

Since the initial launch of Parse’s JavaScript SDK, we have seen many developers building rich web applications with it. These apps are great, but they pose a few challenges for the developers:

• It is difficult to route URLs to various states of the app.
• It is difficult to update URLs and browser history based on user interaction.

To address these issues, we have added a fork of Backbone’s Router and History class to the SDK. With the help of these new classes, managing URLs in the client is now a breeze:

  var AppRouter = Parse.Router.extend({
    routes: {
      "all": "all",
      "active": "active",
      "completed": "completed"
    },

    all: function() {
      state.set({ filter: "all" });
    },

    active: function() {
      state.set({ filter: "active" });
    },

    completed: function() {
      state.set({ filter: "completed" });
    }
  });

  new AppRouter;
  Parse.history.start();

We hope you find these features useful in building your web app!

We’re happy that our users can usually interact with the Parse API programmatically and without much human intervention. One area where we’ve seen the need for better automation is in push notifications, where developers and administrators sometimes want to send a notification at a certain point in the future, but don’t want to write a cron job or stay by the computer waiting to hit send. To automate this situation, our REST API now supports scheduling notifications up to two weeks in the future.

For example, to notify users at 8am Pacific Time on Labor Day, you
could run:

curl -X POST 
  -H "X-Parse-Application-Id: ${APPLICATION_ID}" 
  -H "X-Parse-REST-API-Key: ${REST_API_KEY}" 
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" 
  -d '{
        "channels": [
          "holidays"
        ],
        "push_time": "2012-09-03T08:00:00-07:00",
        "data": {
          "alert": "Time to hit snooze, today is Labor Day!"
        }
      }' 

https://api.parse.com/1/push

We’ve also added a bunch of REST push examples in our docs to help you navigate our expanding push tools. Enjoy!

We can’t help but be amazed by some of the apps that have been built on Parse. There is truly an astonishing amount of skill and creativity in our developer community and we want to do all that we can to allow these talented individuals to innovate together and to share ideas.

We considered many prebuilt support forum and Q&A solutions, but we felt that none of them expressed our commitment to helping our customers and to fostering a Parse community spirit. So we brought this in house, and today we’re excited to announce the launch of Parse Help & Community. Modeled after popular programming forums, this new Q&A site will allow developers to interact directly with the Parse team and to help each other by sharing their Parse and mobile app experiences.

We’ll be actively participating in the discussions, so feel free to ask all of your Parse or mobile related questions there. If you have a more sensitive issue, you can still submit a private inquiry, and we’ll be more than happy to lend you a hand.

Every day we get hundreds of emails and calls from current and potential customers. They come from developers, marketers, advertisers, IT executives, and everyone in between. It’s clear that the world is going mobile and Parse is at the forefront of enabling that shift for companies across the world. We’ve found that many folks are interested in how Parse fits into the greater mobile ecosystem that includes interactive agencies, software development consultancies, existing developer tools, and other platforms.

To that end, I’m excited to announce that we’ve established relationships with leading agencies and studios to help big brands and enterprises make the transition to mobile. Their combined clientele includes the likes of National Geographic, HBO, Obama for America, BMW, Disney, and many more. We’ve also partnered on the technology side to enable developers to use Parse alongside other complementary platforms like Box and Xamarin.

For more information, take a look at our new Partners Page. Stay tuned for more partnership news to come!