Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

Post by karmelapple » Thu, May 19, 2016, 7:54 AM UTC

jwngr wrote: post #80

skrebbel wrote: post #76

As a current Firebase customer, I'm pretty thrilled about all this (especially since I was afraid Google would pull a Facebook here). However, there's quite a bunch of API changes and absolutely no info about how long the old JS library, endpoints, etc etc are to keep working. Should I get stressed out?

(Firebase engineer here) The old SDKs will continue to work! We worked extremely hard to make sure everything was backwards compatible with them. We most certainly do not want to break any existing customer apps. Check out the migration guides [1] to get your app updated to the new SDKs. We understand migrating is not easy or always convenient. If you run into issues or something that used to work seems to be no long…

Post by dmitriz » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:36 AM UTC

guelo wrote: post #93

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

Horizon is only the "realtime db" portion of Firebase and it's only for Javascript, not Android or iOS. The mobile app realtime network connection tech is especially tricky to get right without draining a user's battery by doing things like constantly polling the backend. I have not seen anything from RethinkDB along those lines.

Post by carolus4 » Thu, May 19, 2016, 8:48 AM UTC

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #103

dandelany wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We spend months to migrate our product to PostgreSQL Which means you presumably saved months initially by using Azure, and got your product to market sooner. Everyone should be aware of the dangers of lock-in, and should carefully consider the value of it vs. the liability they're taking on. But I wouldn't say never use products like this. The value-add can be significant, even taking into account the fact that you…

That MIGHT be true, but it's not apparent from their statement. Just because it costs N to build a product on technology X and costs M to migrate an existing product to technology Y does not mean that it would have cost N + M to implement the product on technology Y in the first place.

Post by nathan_f77 » Thu, May 19, 2016, 9:15 AM UTC

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…

Post by neilellis » Thu, May 19, 2016, 11:29 AM UTC

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…