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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

#51

Post by toomuchtodo »

pritambarhate wrote: post #49
mybigsword wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's better to stick with open source stack.

This is a hard lesson each person learns on their own.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#52

Post by espeed »

Kiro wrote: post #43

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?

yes, Firebase allows you to isolate user data, and it has built-in auth API.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#55

Post by pritambarhate »

aeosynth wrote: post #47
pritambarhate wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This seems quite interesting. Hope they chose MIT or Apache for license as said in the ReadMe.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#56

Post by hackergary »

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…

As a mobile (web) developer. How well does it work with React Native, and compare with Realm JS and the new Horizon from RethinkDB?

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#57

Post by velohx »

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.

This is sarcasm, right? Here's some more equivalent sarcasm: Gmail and Google Search could discontinue easily.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#58

Post by samastur »

primitivesuave wrote: post #39

Firebase is an incredibly powerful tool, and in a sense is a "democratizing force" in web development. Now anyone can build a complete web application without needing to know anything about setting up servers, content delivery networks, AWS (which is still quite difficult to use), and scaling. I teach kids as young as 10 years old to build iOS apps and websites with Firebase - they can develop locally and push to Fir…

We are not missing the point. Some of us just happen to value other things more than convenience.

There's no shortage of discontinued products that were cancelled even though a lot of effort and money was poured into them. Amount previously invested is a sunk cost and shouldn't even matter when deciding if continue a service/product or not. Just because you have already dig a hole doesn't mean you should keep digging even though you can't profit from it.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#59

Post by spb »

pritambarhate wrote: post #55
aeosynth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horizon[0] was announced yesterday; it's basically an open-source Firebase built on RethinkDB. [0]: https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon

This seems quite interesting. Hope they chose MIT or Apache for license as said in the ReadMe.

MIT: https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon/commit/79304a56fbcd57a6...

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#60

Post by edko »

WalterSear wrote: post #33
mybigsword wrote: post #19

way too risky to use it for startups. Google may discontinue this project at any time and you have to spend months to rewrite everything for another database. IF google open source it and we will be able to install it on premise and patch without Google, that would be ok. So, I would recommend to use PostgreSQL instead.

Google is dogfooding this in it's other companies, like Nest, fwiw.

Well, yes, but if they decide to discontinue the service, or increase the price, this is no guarantee that all other users will get the same treatment as Alphabet companies.
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