SashiDo is pleased to announce its recent acquisition of all the assets of Octobas.com, a robust and scalable backend for mobile and web apps based on Parse Open Source.

For the past 2 years our mission has been to become a leading Parse Server hosting provider in the mobile and web apps development world as well as to continue improving our service, launching new features and providing quality and security to our customers.

The acquisition of Octobas.com brings us one step closer to accomplishing this goal.

Marian Ignev, CEO of SashiDo said:

This is a strategic acquisition which is part of our global expansion plan. With the Octobas team we will grow our Asia Pacific market share.

As you may know, SashiDo has always been passionate about Parse Server, so teaming up with someone else with whom we share the same passion sounded as the most logical step.

Rabbie Zalaf, CEO of Octobas said:

Knowing the Australian market and what the SashiDo Team and Platform can do, I'm sure that SashiDo will be the most valuable backend provider here.

The acquisition will have no impact on our existing customers - everything will remain as it has been thus far. We will simply have more people joining SashiDo's big family.

The possibilities in front of us are endless and we are thrilled for this new journey.
We will be keeping you posted on all the new cool things that will be happening within the next few months.

So stay tuned!

In the meantime if you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact us.

Today, we are pleased to announce that we have just released a new stable version of Parse Server - 2.3.3.

This is a major release containing new features and bugfixes, and continues our focus on making your experience with SashiDo faster and easier. Here you can find details on what this specific release includes from the official Parse Server GitHub page.

You are probably wondering how you can change the version!

It is pretty simple actually. All you need to do is log into your app’s dashboard and navigate to the App settings section. Once there you will see “Runtimes”- just click on it and you can proceed with the version change.

The current stable version of Parse Server v2.2.25 will be discontinued on January 31st, 2018 so we highly recommend you to test the newer version with your app and make sure everything works as expected before this date.

What we can suggest you is to switch to v2.3.3 on your dev application first and do some tests to ensure that your code works correctly.
Just have in mind that when changing the version, your app will be re-built and re-deployed so give it a couple of minutes before accessing it through the dashboard again.

On January 31st we will remove the older 2.2.25 version, so in case you haven’t switched your apps to v2.3.3 until this date, the system will do it automatically.

Blazing fast Push Notifications

With Parse Server v2.3.3 we are also releasing something that we have been working on lately and we are thrilled to share with you - our brand new Push Notifications service.

That’s right!

If you have sent push notifications with Parse Server you are probably familiar with the issues that come with having larger audience.

We wanted to address these issues and created an external service that can handle your demands.
Our goal was to be able to send push notifications as quickly as possible, perform well under high loads, be able to scale each component of the system according to the demand and last but not least stick to our “No vendor lock-in” policy.

Well, we made it!

After switching to the new Push Notifications service, which is enabled by default with Parse Server v2.3.3 and above on SashiDo, you will be able send push notifications to your clients about 20 times faster than before, without pushing the limits of your Parse Server and slowing down other requests. You will also no longer need to worry about restarts, crashes or deployments. Isn’t that cool?

Why are my push notifications failing?

Additionally we made some improvements in the Dashboard regarding the status of the push notifications. Up until this point, when there were failed push notifications, the only provided information was how many had actually failed. Now, you can see the specific errors that were returned by Apple and/or Google's services.

If you are interested to learn more details about the new Push Notifications service, how it was implemented and how it is working, you can check the blog post from our engineering team here:

Sending 100k Push Notifications per second with Go, Redis and NATS

We remain at your disposal in case questions pop up, so do not hesitate to reach us back any time.

Happy coding!

Push notifications allow you to stay in touch with your users and make it possible for your users to communicate with each other. Before you begin, remember that push notifications are not available in the iOS Simulator. You will need an iOS device, as well as an Apple certificate to complete this tutorial.

Create your APNS (iOS) credentials

Creating your Apple Push Notification Service credentials is actually the longest part of this tutorial.

1. Log in to the Apple Developer Member Center and click on Identifiers under iOS Apps and locate your application in the list.

2. Click the + symbol and fill out the form. Make sure you tick off the Push Notifications checkbox.

3. Select your App under the section Identifiers and click on it. Then click edit.

4. Go to the section Push Notifications. Choose either the Development or Production certificate option and click Create Certificate.

5. Follow the instructions in the Add iOS Certificate Assistant and click continue.

6. Using the Certificate Signing request that was just created, generate the APNS Push SSL certificate.

7. When the Download button appears, you can download your certificate(s). You may need to reload the page for this to update.

8. Open the downloaded certificate with the Keychain Access app.

9. You will see your certificate under My Certificates or Certificates.

10. The final step is to export your certificate as a .p12 file. Select the certificate that was just added to the Keychain Access and select File -> Export Items... from the menu. When saving the file, use the Personal Information Exchange (.p12) format.

Ok, you’ve got your .p12 file :)

Configuring the SashiDo App

To send Push Notifications with SashiDo you will need to upload the certificate you created above.

Navigate to your SashiDo Dashboard, and click on App Settings, then Push. Click on Upload a file under Apple Push Certificates and locate the .p12 certificate.

Get the example app from SashiDo

Download or clone the example app from SashiDo repository on GitHub and change the your_application_id, your_client_key and api_end_point in AppDelegate.m file on line 22. It looks like this:

[Parse initializeWithConfiguration:[ParseClientConfiguration configurationWithBlock:^(id<ParseMutableClientConfiguration> configuration) {
        configuration.applicationId = @"your_application_id";
        configuration.clientKey = @"your_client_key";
        configuration.server = @"api_end_point";
}]];

Build the example app on your iOS Device

This should be a trivial step but you can find more information in the official Apple guides.

Sending Push Notifications

Now it's time for you to send some test push notifications.
Navigate to your SashiDo Dashboard, and click on Push, then Send a push. For testing purposes, you can use the default Everyone audience to send a message to all of your registered devices regardless of the platform. Simply enter a message and click Send! You should see the notification appearing within a few seconds on your device.

For more information on advanced push targeting techniques you can see the Parse Push Notifications for iOS and OS X Guide

That's it! Now you can use the power of push notification in your App :)

Last few days our clients had problems with Apps that used GCM credentials to send push notifications to Android devices. This was caused by the fact that Google recently released improved version of GCM API under the Firebase brand - FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging).

Although Google says that they will continue to support the current version of GCM Android and iOS SDKs, they highly recommend everyone to upgrade to FCM in order to benefit from new FCM features today and in the future.

To start using FCM you need your new credentials from the Firebase dashboard. But before we continue with our step-by-step guide on how to do that, let's review some of the most frequently asked questions about GCM and FCM we've received recently.

Q: Is GCM now depreciated? Are they going to stop all services & support of GCM?

Yes, some features of GCM are already depreciated and now in the coming days GCM is going to be fully depreciated.

Google says "We will continue to support the current version of GCM Android and iOS SDKs because we know a lot of developers are using GCM SDKs today to handle notifications, and client app upgrade takes time.

But all new client-side features will be added to FCM SDKs only moving forward. You are strongly encouraged to upgrade to FCM SDKs"

Q: Why we need to migrate from GCM to FCM

FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) is an improved version of the GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) API under the Firebase brand. It inherits GCM’s core infrastructure, with new SDKs to make Cloud Messaging development easier.
Even more if you have some problems with Android Push Notifications on our Parse Server in SashiDo we suggest you to migrate to FCM.

Q: Can I update my old applications from GCM to FCM

Yes!
You can import your GCM project as a Firebase project following few easy steps and the best part is that you will keep your Sender ID.

Start using FCM - step-by-step guide

1. Open the Firebase console and select Import Google Project.

2. Select your GCM project from the list of existing projects and click on Add Firebase.

3. In the Firebase welcome screen, select Project Settings.

4. Select the tab called "Cloud Messaging" and get your "Sender ID" and "Server Key".

5. Go to SashiDo's Dashboard and set up your "Sender ID" and "Server Key" in your App Settings -> Push in section Android Push Credentials.

6. Now you can test your app Push Notifications

Finally, check if your application has received the test push notification. If you experience some difficulties, don't hesitate to contact our support team!

Happy Sending :)

This tutorial will show you how to setup Android Push Notifications for your app on SashiDo.

Setup your GCM Credentials

Create or login into google to get your Android application credentials (GCM Sender ID and GCM API Key).

The "GCM Sender ID" is a public number that identifies the sender of a push notification. You can get it from the
Dashboard by clicking on your project as displayed below. It is listed as "Project number".

The GCM API Key is a server secret that allows a server to send pushes to a registration ID on behalf of a particular sender ID and can be obtained from the Credentials tab as shown below. You have to create android type API pair.

Apparently google have dropped the support for unrestricted keys.

And now when creating API key you need to restrict it.

To be able to send push notification to GCM with SashiDo you need to use IP Addresses restriction: 52.0.0.0/8. Here is a short video showing how to do this:

How to setup your Application in SashiDo

Navigate to the SashiDo Dashboard. Select your application and go to App Settings then Push menu, where you will see three sections with settings.

In the Android Push Credentials section add your "GCM Sender ID" and "GCM API Key".

Sample Android Push Notification Application

You can clone and use our sample application to test Push Notifications on SashiDo.

Navigate to your App Settings tab. Select the Security & Keys menu and you will see a list of keys. Three of these keys are relevant for the Push notifications and need to be copied to your application code.

Next you have to copy "Application ID", "Client Key" and "Server URL" into the respective place holders in the
AppConfig.java file in your project as shown below. Similarly, for the "GCM_SENDER_ID" string add the GCM Sender ID value that you collected in the beginning of this tutorial.

Open the AndroidManifest.xml file in your Android project and replace your GCM Sender ID as the value "GCM_SENDER_ID" in the following line:

Finally, you can test your app Push Notifications

Check if your application receive the push notification. If you have any issues, please let us know.

Happy Sending :)