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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

#141

Post by nihonde »

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…

This is good news for me. File storage and push messaging are particularly nice.

As a user of the Firebase iOS SDK, I was wondering why the SDK was getting so stale. The Quickstart guide used deprecated Swift, didn't offer Carthage support, etc.

I looked at the new docs, and I guess they ditched the old Quickstart format in favor of a bunch of examples. At least the code seems to be up to date, which is somewhat encouraging. I still wish for Carthage support, though.

I see a lot of people worrying about reliance on proprietary BaaS. I had services running on Parse when it announced the shutdown, and it really wasn't that hard to migrate. Firebase should be even easier to leave if necessary, since it's basically just a NoSQL data model. If you abstract your queries and avoid some bells and whistles, you can keep everything in one place for a relatively painless move that hopefully will never become necessary.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#142

Post by coffeemug »

EGreg wrote: post #138
hiphipjorge wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by doing things like constantly polling the backend RethinkDB doesn't require polling. It's like their #1 feature and differentiator from other non-sql databases.

What do they do? We use websockets in our realtime platform.

The Horizon client uses websockets to connect to the Horizon server. The Horizon server uses RethinkDB's protocol[1] to connect to the database.

[1] http://rethinkdb.com/docs/writing-drivers/

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#143

Post by angryasian »

pier25 wrote: post #134

So how would one address server side logic? Like for example doing something with the data before sending it to the client?

I think this is the biggest issue with firebase that I can't find an answer to. It seems everyone is ok with just doing everything on the client side. Schema changes, business logic, etc.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#144

Post by losty »

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…

Why not put a minimum service life on Firebase similar to an LTS release? I imagine uptake would increase by an order of magnitude.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#145

Post by csears »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #94
toomuchtodo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's better to stick with open source stack. This is a hard lesson each person learns on their own.

The difference is actually between a product and a service . A service is something that another party provides, and that may - actually, they most definitely will - at some point stop providing, for various reasons. You want to minimize your dependence on any services - especially ones that are not trivially replaceable or that don't come with contractual agreements to cover your costs in case of the service being s…

I totally respect your perspective, but SaaS is gaining popularity because software customers are making an informed decision about the tradeoffs of product vs service as a delivery model, not because service providers are forcing the SaaS model on them. Many customers see value in shifting the operations and support burden to the software vendor. I think it's ultimately good that users have more choice in how they consume software. Diversity is positive for the computing universe.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#146

Post by CydeWeys »

kuschku wrote: post #119
manigandham wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buying into Google's PR is what this is Really? Have you actually used it or done any research? 1. Container Engine = built on kubernetes, faster and easier than the others 2. Compute Engine = VMs start faster, customizable rather than set sizes, live migration when the host has maintenance or starts to fail, NVME SSDs available with 3. Networking = faster and more consistent performance, all the regions are connec…

And all of it nicely accessible to the US. What a great idea.

Amazon and Microsoft are both also US-based companies.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#147

Post by ryanobjc »

chatmasta wrote: post #45

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.

Your first hint that Google was very serious about cloud, was when we hired Diane Greene:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-hires-diane-greene-to-...

Also when Urs publically states he wants Google Cloud revenue to be bigger than adwords, that ain't nothing:

http://www.businessinsider.com/urs-holze-talks-google-cloud-...

I know it's popular to be cynical about Google and how we'll deprecate everything just as it's popular, but that kind of cynicism isn't really good for your health.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#148

Post by jamest »

ssijak wrote: post #109

What is the state of AngularFire library, there are no guides for angular in the new documentation? And when will the angularfire for angular2 be ready to use?

We launched AngularFire2 into beta at ng-conf earlier this month:

https://github.com/angular/angularfire2

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#149

Post by pier25 »

angryasian wrote: post #143
pier25 wrote: post #134

So how would one address server side logic? Like for example doing something with the data before sending it to the client?

I think this is the biggest issue with firebase that I can't find an answer to. It seems everyone is ok with just doing everything on the client side. Schema changes, business logic, etc.

From what I've seen, all backend duties are implemented in a server acting as another client to Firebase. Usually a Node server since Firebase has provided a JS SDK from the start, but I've seen implementations in all major languages.

You either implement some cron task in that server that periodically makes stuff with Firebase, or you use an endpoint in Firebase and use it a task queue for the server.

I'd would be great if someone with more experience could provide more info on how these backend duties are performed.

Edit: see this for more info https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firebase-talk/r4d5H7...

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#150

Post by igravious »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #94
toomuchtodo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's better to stick with open source stack. This is a hard lesson each person learns on their own.

The difference is actually between a product and a service . A service is something that another party provides, and that may - actually, they most definitely will - at some point stop providing, for various reasons. You want to minimize your dependence on any services - especially ones that are not trivially replaceable or that don't come with contractual agreements to cover your costs in case of the service being s…

That's why we need SaaSaaS. That'll fix it.
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