Parse Server and MongoDB basics

Question

I am writing an android restaurant delivery application, that sends customer orders to a back-end and receive push notifications. I am thinking about using Parse Server which uses MongoDB, instead of using a relational database. The database will be hosted on Back4App (which is a very useful development tool for Parse server back-end).

The database system must be able to receive data from the android application and manage that data and send queries, also I need to send push notifications from the server to the application.

Now that you understand what I aim to do, I would appreciate if someone answered the following questions :

1. How good do I need to be in JavaScript ? in order to store and manage data in Parse Server ?

2. How to write queries in Parse Server ? What programming languages I need to know ?

3. since I am a beginner, is it hard to learn everything about Parse Server in 3 weeks ?

4. I know that MongoDB does not use tables or SQL, how does MongoDB work exactly with Parse Server ? Do I need to know a lot about MongoDB before attempting to use Parse Server?

5. what is Node.js exactly? is this any different from JavaScript ?

I am doing a Senior Project and I would really appreciate the help of the community. Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

If your only client is an Android app, you don't need to know much Javascript or node.js. There are guides for how to install and set up Parse Server that don'trequire programming. If you want a web client or server side code then that's a different story. In my experience not much knowledge of MongoDB is needed either but that may depend on your host. I use Atlas, which has pretty good tools. Some familiarity with JSON would be helpful.

I don't know if Parse has a Kotlin SDK or if you're planning to write your app in Java or Kotlin but you'll need to know one of those well..

Answer 2

I hope is everything well with you!

Back4App is a backend-as-a-service which prepares an App in a few minutes for you to start to work.

You can use Javascript in the Cloud Code environment which you can deploy .js codes to help you for complex logic or to these codes become available to all mobile/web/IoT environments instantly. Read more about it here .

Also, the Cloud Code already configured a Node.js environment, you don't need to configure again.

The default entry point for your Cloud Code is at ./cloud/main.js .

You can learn using guides regarding Android Parse SDK Android, check below:

https://www.back4app.com/docs/android/parse-android-sdk

If you want to host a web app in Back4App, you can follow the guide below:

https://www.back4app.com/docs/platform/node-js-web-server