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Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

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Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#11

Post by intrasight »

dvcrn wrote: post #7

Apologies for the question but what benefits do I get if I build on firebase? From the people I talked to it seems that the main audience for firebase is mobile engineers that either don't have the skillset or the time to learn how to build a backend system. Most people I talked to also told me they wouldn't use firebase if they could build a backend.

Firebase is also useful for "rich prototyping". I work with a skilled front-end developer who can also work with Firebase. The result is that a functional app can be created quickly. Then it's up to the client to decide if they wish to replace Firebase or live with its limitations.

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#12

Post by soundoflight »

dvcrn wrote: post #7

Apologies for the question but what benefits do I get if I build on firebase? From the people I talked to it seems that the main audience for firebase is mobile engineers that either don't have the skillset or the time to learn how to build a backend system. Most people I talked to also told me they wouldn't use firebase if they could build a backend.

Firebase gives you a real-time database with no initial setup. The only really big competitor I know of it is RethinkDB. Having "three-way" databinding in a SPA is pretty cool and wouldn't be something that would be trivial to setup without either of these two databases.

I could see Firebase being a great go to for a certain size of project in the small to medium size that would rather pay for this feature set that using AWS, Azure, Rackspace, etc.

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#13

Post by diggan »

pietro wrote: post #6
chvid wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should some of those not be dev-dependencies?

Yes, the ones related to Babel and Webpack.

Well, in fact all of them should be devDependencies because the artifact of a build would contain everything, none of those things would be needed at runtime.

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#14

Post by mazlix »

dvcrn wrote: post #7

Apologies for the question but what benefits do I get if I build on firebase? From the people I talked to it seems that the main audience for firebase is mobile engineers that either don't have the skillset or the time to learn how to build a backend system. Most people I talked to also told me they wouldn't use firebase if they could build a backend.

In addition to the other comments, by only needing to write frontend code you can also host your website much cheaper and scalably (via something like amazon S3 & CDN). You'd pay more like several pennies for 100's of users (ignoring any scaling costs w/ Firebase) rather than a min of ~$10/mo.

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#15

Post by kylestlb »

Nicely done! I did a similar thing with the VueJS/horizon.io combo. It's a little rough around the edges - I just wanted to have some sort of scaffold for personal stuff. Link is https://github.com/kylestlb/vuex-horizon-scaffold for anyone interested. And yes, there are tons of devDependencies so I wouldn't call mine minimal I suppose :)

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#16

Post by mercer »

kylestlb wrote: post #15

Nicely done! I did a similar thing with the VueJS/horizon.io combo. It's a little rough around the edges - I just wanted to have some sort of scaffold for personal stuff. Link is https://github.com/kylestlb/vuex-horizon-scaffold for anyone interested. And yes, there are tons of devDependencies so I wouldn't call mine minimal I suppose :)

Awesome! I've been using horizon.io in combination with React (and Redux, because I'm all hip and stuff!) for 'scratch-my-own-itch' projects and on the whole I've been very happy with the process.

While there are some obvious limitations to using Horizon, it's incredibly convenient for quickly getting something working that 1) is online, public-facing, but secure (OAuth), and 2) provides a CRUD back-end very quickly with little work.

I've run into a bug or two so far, and the documentation isn't entirely up to snuff, but I can highly recommend Horizon for some use cases.

Specifically, Horizon is great out-of-the-box if you're creating an app where there's authenticated users who can do pretty much anything to entities owned by themselves, and where a client-side interface suffices. A todo app, or journalling app would be a typical example: the user can do whatever he pleases with his own todos/journal-entries, provided that he's authenticated.

Any greater complexity server-side probably needs an Express app (or Hapi, Koa, etc.), but there's really quite a lot you can do with a 'vanilla' Horizon server.

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#17

Post by kylestlb »

mercer wrote: post #16
kylestlb wrote: post #15

Nicely done! I did a similar thing with the VueJS/horizon.io combo. It's a little rough around the edges - I just wanted to have some sort of scaffold for personal stuff. Link is https://github.com/kylestlb/vuex-horizon-scaffold for anyone interested. And yes, there are tons of devDependencies so I wouldn't call mine minimal I suppose :)

Awesome! I've been using horizon.io in combination with React (and Redux, because I'm all hip and stuff!) for 'scratch-my-own-itch' projects and on the whole I've been very happy with the process. While there are some obvious limitations to using Horizon, it's incredibly convenient for quickly getting something working that 1) is online, public-facing, but secure (OAuth), and 2) provides a CRUD back-end very quickly…

Agreed, and I think a good solution is to build specific services that do the complex things which talk to the same db, and then just use horizon for the reasons you mentioned.

Re: Show HN: A minimal setup for React/ES6 sites with a Firebase back end

#19

Post by WalterSear »

dvcrn wrote: post #7

Apologies for the question but what benefits do I get if I build on firebase? From the people I talked to it seems that the main audience for firebase is mobile engineers that either don't have the skillset or the time to learn how to build a backend system. Most people I talked to also told me they wouldn't use firebase if they could build a backend.

Another benefit that others haven't mentioned, is that if active server behaviours are needed, you can attach a 'server' like a client.

In some circumstances, interacting with users via the database as a messaging system can protect them from issues with your server code, and server outages: if your server goes down, users will still be able to log in and interact with the database via client side code - they'll only lose access to server related functions.

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