Open-sourcing has become a sort of trend in this era of developers. Most of the software development kits developed by major firms have been open-sourced today not just to give developers an insight on how the code works, but also to allow them to help make the softwares better by reporting bug fixes and feature improvements.
Facebook’s backend platform for apps, Parse, which the social giant acquired in 2013, also thinks in a similar fashion. After a lot of popular demand by developers around the globe, Parse has finally open-sourced all of its SDKs.
The company announced today via a blog post that they are open-sourcing all of their SDKs, thus joining other Facebook projects like React, Presto, HHVM, OSQuery, and RocksDB have been doing over the years. The iOS, Mac OS X and the Android SDKs are now available to anyone who wants them, on GitHub. The SDKs for other platforms including Windows Phone, JavaScript, Xamarin and React are expected to follow soon.
According to the blog post, “Parse SDKs now power more than 800 million active app-device pairs per month.” And the company wants to accelerate growth and innovation with the help of developers across the continents.
The API released today, the post reads, is designed to be easy to understand and use. To get this done, the team structured the public API as a facade for internal code and functionality that could be consistently changing. Other challenges that the Parse team had to face before releasing the final public build of the SDK that are listed in the post include architecture unity and performance, both of which the team has dealt with with flying colours.
Another big announcement is that Parse is also opening a new developer support flow using GitHub Issues. Developers can directly interact with the Parse team and other Parse developers via this platform.
Concluding the post, Nikita Lutsenko, Software Engineer at Parse, writes:
By sharing our SDK source code with the community, we want to share everything we’ve learned along the way, as we hope this will benefit others working on similar challenges in the mobile development space. We know we’ll continue learning, too, from the contributions of developers and engineers around the world. We can’t wait to hear what you have to say.
The Parse team has open-sourced other products in the past and its GitHub repository currently houses over 40 projects. Though, this one, by far is the most ambitious step the company has taken.
