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Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

firebase.googleblog.com

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Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#41

Post by blizkreeg »

mayop100 wrote: post #21
robotnoises wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New dashboard look & feel is awesome. Lots to digest from that short keynote, but I'm excited to see Google double-down on its investment (Hi, Facebook). Looks like https://console.firebase.google.com is getting slammed. All of my attempted imports are failing.

Yeah, sorry about that! We're working to get more capacity ASAP. The response has been incredible.

I'm actually not seeing my current projects at https://console.firebase.google.com/ and I have two (one sandbox, one prod). Is this due to the over-capacity?

They're just not listed under "Projects using Firebase".

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#43

Post by Kiro »

I'm building a simple web app where I want signed in users to be able to add a JSON object to a database and then list all JSON objects publicly. Only the user who created the object should be able to edit it. Is this a good use-case for Firebase or should I look into something else?

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#44

Post by timjver »

I love Firebase, but the Swift code in the iOS guide is of really low quality. For example (https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/ios/save-data#dele...):

    if currentData.value != nil, let uid = FIRAuth.auth()?.currentUser?.uid {
        var post = currentData.value as! [String : AnyObject]
        var stars : Dictionary
        stars = post["stars"] as? Dictionary ?? [:]
        // ...
    }
What this should really be:

    guard let post = currentData.value as? [String : AnyObject],
    uid = FIRAuth.auth()?.currentUser?.uid else { return FIRTransactionResult.successWithValue(currentData) }

        let stars = post["stars"] as? [String : Bool] ?? [:]
        // ...
    }

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#45

Post by chatmasta »

Interesting that Google is doubling down where Facebook divested. The obvious difference is that Google has a cloud platform and Firebase is a funnel into it, whereas Facebook had nothing to funnel Parse users into.

I wonder if Facebook will ever launch a cloud platform. They've got the computing resources for it.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#46

Post by [deleted] »

mybigsword wrote: post #30
mayop100 wrote: post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

You should never use products like this where you are completely vendor-locked and will be unable to switch easily to another provider. I did this mistake before and we used SQL Azure Federations (cool & cheap autosharding for SQL Server), then Microsoft decided to discontinue it and provide only very expensive up-scale version of SQL Server instead. We spend months to migrate our product to PostgreSQL... and this is…

[deleted]

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#47

Post by aeosynth »

pritambarhate wrote: post #32
mayop100 wrote: post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

Is there an Open Source version of Firebase which we can use on our own hardware if we wish to? Vendor lock-in is the biggest fear I have with Firebase. Like Facebook (Parse), if Google also decides that Firebase is not profitable and decides to close down, how do we run our applications without rewriting? How do we protect ourselves, if Google decides to increase the price of Firebase 3-4 times in a single day? Even…

Horizon[0] was announced yesterday; it's basically an open-source Firebase built on RethinkDB.

[0]: https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#48

Post by williamstein »

mybigsword wrote: post #40
csmajorfive wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less likely to happen here because Google is investing heavily in building a business around developer services.

I cannot agree with that. Google Cloud services are way too small comparing to AWS or Azure and they don't make a lot of money with it. They can discontinue it easily.

+1 -- Sometimes Google does embrace open source in building services that I can trust longterm, e.g., Kubernetes. I wish Firebase (which I won't use) were being built and marketed in a similar way to Kubernetes (which I will use).

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#49

Post by pritambarhate »

mybigsword wrote: post #30
mayop100 wrote: post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

You should never use products like this where you are completely vendor-locked and will be unable to switch easily to another provider. I did this mistake before and we used SQL Azure Federations (cool & cheap autosharding for SQL Server), then Microsoft decided to discontinue it and provide only very expensive up-scale version of SQL Server instead. We spend months to migrate our product to PostgreSQL... and this is…

I did this mistake with Parse. The open source version released doesn't have full features and we have run into a few bugs which created a lot of issues.

It's better to stick with open source stack. I like what Amazon is doing with AWS with services like RDS and ElastiCache. If one carefully selects the services on AWS, there is almost zero vendor lock in.

Google also had hiked the AppEngine price in Sept. 2011 which caused a lot of problems to early adopters.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#50

Post by nwrk »

pritambarhate wrote: post #32
mayop100 wrote: post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

Is there an Open Source version of Firebase which we can use on our own hardware if we wish to? Vendor lock-in is the biggest fear I have with Firebase. Like Facebook (Parse), if Google also decides that Firebase is not profitable and decides to close down, how do we run our applications without rewriting? How do we protect ourselves, if Google decides to increase the price of Firebase 3-4 times in a single day? Even…

Self hosted 'firebase' from RethinkDB team http://horizon.io/
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