As a Core Team we have recently been having discussions about how we see the Parse Platform, both now and in the future. We worked on creating a mission statement to give us a grounding point and guidance for the future direction of the project.
This is what we came up with…
Empower any developer with a state-of-the-art alternative backend, driven by an open-source community.
Which translates into:
Empower
Provide developers with a rich, extensible product with high versatility for many use cases.
any developer
Accessible to and useful for new developers who work on their hobby project as well as experienced developers who look for a sophisticated platform to power a heavy production application.
with a state-of-the-art
Keep the product secure, reliable, up-to-date, and future-proof considering technology trends.
alternative backend
A free alternative to commercial offerings that does not lock in but is open, interoperable and customizable.
driven by an open-source community
Built by the community for the community in transparent, open and inclusive spaces.
Over to you!
The mission statement should be reflective of the wider community so we need your thoughts! Does it hit the spot or miss completely? Are there any important aspects that we haven’t included?
The discussion will be open for 7 days and longer if necessary. We’ll take on board any feedback, make adjustments where necessary and then have a vote on whether to adopt the proposed statement.
Very good points, much better than before when Parse was closed source, and because of theses points I will keep using and working with Parse Platform.
@badboy_tian Thanks for your suggestion. A feature like multi-language support would be expected from a state-of-the-art backend, so this is already considered in the statement. Besides that, Parse Server already offers multi-language support. If you have a specific feature suggestion, you can open a new topic in the forum to discuss it.
Hello everyone, I am agree with all topics. I want to look to topic from another aspect. For continue to work on this awesome project & community we also need to spend effort in our marketing side. What I mean by marketing ? Anybody who know parse-server would love it there is no concern for that but for welcomers, students or anyone who get into industry around 2020s will be know less about Parse than the ones around 2017-2020. We need to make Parse more visible and accessible. We can use media elements more efficiently. We can make example parse server apps for hype topics (Crypto currently) and things like that. I believe this is also important as much as technical development.
All the best !
@suathh Thanks for your feedback. I agree and this is something we will be looking at.
The topic about AI for Parse Server did not resonate much (to my surprise), but example projects about emerging technologies like AI, crypto, blockchain, robotics, quantum surely make for attractive and exciting entry projects for new developers. (If you want to ideate around a crypo parse server example project, feel free to open a new topic.)
Parse used to be a commercial brand and we have been largely benefiting from and resting on the efforts the former commercial Parse / Facebook team has put into marketing to establish this brand. While we are currently entertaining a few social media channels and do have a tech blog article written about us every now and then, there is clearly more we can do and in a more strategic and coherent way. For example, we are currently in talks to develop strategic partnerships and increase the interconnection to other developer communities, for the Parse Platform to gain more exposure.
The PMC is currently fundamentally rethinking its project management approach, from being rather reactive to becoming more pro-active and forward-planning. This should yield concrete strategic objectives and plans how to reach them, and marketing is one aspect. Developing a mission statement is the first step in this journey. We will share more in the months ahead to gather community feedback.
Hey guys great to be here, I just joined today, and was gonna contribute to Parse server, but what i think is a the future is out of all the aspects we should be concentration utmost on the security stack, cause for the cloud providers to be making Parse Server the Standard for a Backend as a Service like they did for kubernetes we should invest a lot into it, I know parse being a backend Service is harder to Maintain Security, but Before Concentrating on the feature, if we make the available feature the most secure, the cloud providers can directly go for our release, instead of 3rd party secure releases. AND I am new here and you guys totally know the platform, I just had the feedback and was happy to share.
You are absolutely correct. Parse Server security is a priority topic for us and is reflected in the mission statement with state-of-the-art. It is the basis to consider Parse Server for a serious production application. Security includes many aspects, such as immediate official release of security updates (rather than only merging a PR into the unstable main branch), aiding developers (more secure default settings, automated security checks) and generally designing a QA policy for our most important repos and primary ecosystems. Most important of all, we require a product strategy that considers security as a priority. That is why the PMC has started a process to define a more strategic approach to how we manage the project and we will share more with the community over the next months.
I love the statement, I can see it reflected in the current product state and it’s something that I would like to go for in the future.
I would also add something like developer-friendly somewhere. Nowadays developers have become very valuable customers and as such, they chose products and brands who make them feel valued and give them the best experience. We’d want to make sure to channel some of our efforts making their lives easier at a rate similar to what other frameworks offer… and that’s a lot of effort, I know.
@RaschidJFR Thanks for your feedback. I agree and since development-friendliness is rather abstract and can cover a broad array of topics, I think it is generally reflected in empower any developer. That can mean topics like well maintained docs, aiding developers with example projects and security / code quality best practices, hands-on sessions and webinars, and creating inclusive spaces for developer exchange and support.
I would like to add that any developer should be understood beyond a developer’s level of experience. It is intended to mean inclusiveness in a broad sense.
For example, for developer in countries without reliable infrastructure and internet connection, who want to use Parse Platform to develop a service for users in their society, we want Parse Platform to provide the technical solutions that consider these environments. Another example is making sure Parse Platform works with languages other than English, especially RTL languages and allows localization.
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