In this project, we'll modify our game from the previous project so that it can submit scores to a global leader-board and display the top scores from that leader-board within the app.
We could have written lots of code in a server-side language and provided all sorts of instructions for creating a server from scratch to serve our app, but there is an inherent difficulty here—it is far too easy to introduce security holes unawares, and one needs to have a deep understanding of how the operating system, database, and server-side code interact to perform as a backend. As such, it involves a lot of code, a lot of security discussions, and those are, frankly, out of the scope of this book. Parse, on the other hand, takes care of many of the security issues, doesn't require an additional server to maintain, and supports a simple database model where we can store records and execute queries to retrieve them again. It also offers a lot of other features, including...