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Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#21

Post by xgenecloud »

digianarchist wrote: post #8

Is open source Parse still going? https://parseplatform.org/

XgeneCloud:

An open source alternative of Parse for SQL databases : https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud

* Instantly generates REST APIs & GraphQL APIs on 'ANY' MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite & MariaDB databases.

* Has a built in GUI to design SQL schema which auto-generates reversible schema migrations.

* And lastly, the entire backend generated can be even deployed as a Lambda Function or GCP Cloud Function or Azure Function App!

Demos are below : Happy to answer any questions

[1] : GUI based schema designer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETEEcY4mmEg&list=PLhQvP2JTFb...

[2] : REST API creation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEU-QvmwSKQ&list=PLhQvP2JTFb...

[3] : GraphQL API creation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaLIpXe1gb0&list=PLhQvP2JTFb...

(full disclosure : Im the Founder of XgeneCloud)

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#23

Post by kgraves »

kiwicopple wrote: post #12
lukevp wrote: post #10

There really isn’t a competitor. Supabase is trying to combine OSS tooling into a somewhat similar offering but it’s not nearly as feature rich as Firebase. That having been said, most people use Firebase for real time DB and auth, and Supabase supports that now. It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases, or any of the advanced functionality of firebase. Pouch and couch solve the offline data scenario and live r…

Thanks for the mention lukevp. I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast. We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the resul…

kiwicopple, really excited with how Supabase is coming along, definitely a need in the developer space to reduce reliance on Google services and Firebase is a big one, just a couple of questions:

1) Has there been anyone using Supabase in production?

2) I've seen on the website that it's currently in Alpha, If I was looking to use Supabase right now, I should expect breaking changes right?

3) Is a migration from Firebase to Supabase in the pipeline, this would certainly increase adoption.

Thanks for your work.

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#24

Post by pgt »

I'm hedging my bets by using Datalog and the Datomic protocol wherever I can: https://tonsky.me/blog/datomic-as-protocol/

And keeping a close eye on Differential Dataflow: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/

DD is commercialized in Materialize: https://materialize.io/

The solution is likely to arrive in the Clojure/ClojureScript ecosystem before it arrives anywhere else because tools like Datascript lend itself to this type of thinking, e.g. 3DF: https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df/

The closest thing we have to streaming updates right now is FactUI, which uses the Clara rules engine, but it's IMO hampered by limitations of Clara and Cljs namespacing: https://github.com/arachne-framework/factui

The RETE algorithm is a less general solution to incremental updates. Zach Oakes is doing some interesting work with O'Doyle Rules: https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#25

Post by pgt »

pgt wrote: post #24

I'm hedging my bets by using Datalog and the Datomic protocol wherever I can: https://tonsky.me/blog/datomic-as-protocol/ And keeping a close eye on Differential Dataflow: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/ DD is commercialized in Materialize: https://materialize.io/ The solution is likely to arrive in the Clojure/ClojureScript ecosystem before it arrives anywhere else because tools like Datascr…

For context, refer to Tonsky's essay on The Web After Tomorrow: https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/

Differential Dataflow + Datomic solves this problem.

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#26

Post by muzani »

digianarchist wrote: post #8

Is open source Parse still going? https://parseplatform.org/

Yeah, I still use Parse over Firebase in all my "full stack" work. I used to teach Firebase database to polytechnic students, and most of them had trouble with it even when given months. Parse Server was very easy to teach, and nearly all of them set it up within a day.

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#27

Post by muzani »

kgraves wrote: post #22
digianarchist wrote: post #8

Is open source Parse still going? https://parseplatform.org/

How does Parse compare to something like Firebase or Supabase?

I'm not sure about Supabase, but compared to Firebase...

Pros: Free, though you self-pay for server and MongoDB. Continuously improving. Much, much easier to set up for CRUD - I can get one up within half an hour. Web support seems better. Handles relations very well, whether it's one to one, many to many. God forbid you want to upload images direct to MongoDB, it handles that well. Integrates into some email adapters as well. The dashboard that accesses the DB is sexy and powerful, and has improved a lot since Facebook abandoned Parse.

Documentation is excellent, far better than Firebase. And the data belongs to you even if Firebase shuts down.

Cons: Self-hosted. Poor support. And won't land you any full yome jobs. Database is not real time unlike Firebase. Analytics and bug tracking is probably worse.

Similar: Cloud hosted functions, authentication. I don't remember if Firebase does sessions, but it handles that too, on web and apps.

In general, it's perfect for CRUD, especially on different range of apps and web.

Re: Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

#28

Post by kiwicopple »

kgraves wrote: post #23
kiwicopple wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the mention lukevp. I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast. We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the resul…

kiwicopple, really excited with how Supabase is coming along, definitely a need in the developer space to reduce reliance on Google services and Firebase is a big one, just a couple of questions: 1) Has there been anyone using Supabase in production? 2) I've seen on the website that it's currently in Alpha, If I was looking to use Supabase right now, I should expect breaking changes right? 3) Is a migration from Fire…

Good questions.

> Has there been anyone using Supabase in production?

Yes, we're relatively stable now so the early adopters have been relaxed about using us in production. Our largest user is a scraping platform (https://www.monitoro.xyz), who have been great at stress testing (the team, and the platform). We're doing ~1M API calls/day right now. We will into Beta at the start of December once we've finished the load testing and security audits.

> If I was looking to use Supabase right now, I should expect breaking changes right?

You're best to wait for 2 weeks because we're about to do a PR [1] with some breaking changes [2] on the client library. It is a significantly better DX though, which the community really helped to improve. I'll merge this on Friday next week.

> Is a migration from Firebase to Supabase in the pipeline, this would certainly increase adoption

We have an issue on this one here [3]. We will look into this in December when we move out of alpha

[1] PR: https://github.com/supabase/supabase-js/pull/50

[2] Breaking changes: https://www.notion.so/supabase/Supabase-improved-DX-46907b88...

[3] Firebase migration: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/issues/175

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