"And then, the realization: 'let’s build the picks and shovels, instead of panning for gold.'"
Something about this line really irked me. Not really the kind of thing I'd want to read as a potential customer.
Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#12What is the difference between this and Firebase?
From the start, security has been very important to the spire.io team. That does not seem to be the case with Firebase.
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#13What is the difference between this and Firebase?
Firebase has a much nicer API. It's organized around a realtime, ordered, tree datastore. This makes it much more akin to very granular database than a message bus. Spire is just an authentication service + channels. There is no state beyond the historical list of messages in a channel. That makes it a really thin layer over Socket.IO. Firebase solves a much harder problem of state synchronization.
Firebase allows you can listen to any part of the subtree and query particular children of a node. Data is synchronized in realtime, optimistically, and the events that fire allow you to easily tie your UI or Backbone model to the datastore. It also has critical features like transactions. This is much more flexible than what Spire.IO currently provides.
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#14What is the difference between this and Firebase?
From the start, security has been very important to the spire.io team. That does not seem to be the case with Firebase.
My feeling is that both wants to solve the exact same problem but they decided of a different route to get there. I feel the Firebase way started more as marketting and hype, while Spire.IO is a more traditional minimalistic version of what the real thing could be. (For instance, I could write a real app on spire while it'd be impossible on firebase as there's no authentication system.)
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#15I have no problem with these new backend as a service providers. Parse, FireBase, Spire.io, etc. The problem I have is what happens when you have all your data hosted with them and they go away. You are stuck either rebuilding the same API they had or migrating to another provider. That said I have used Parse and it is amazing at how fast you can get up and running. I will definitely be giving Parse a good look when…
What could happen is a great open source library that you could host yourself on a linode. So, it's "backend-less" in the sense that you don't have to do backend stuff, but you still have control over your databases. Seems like it's the way that spire took.. where you can use their services if you want, but you'll be able to host everything yourself because they open source mostly everything. Their challenge, a little bit like Github, is to make their service so awesome that you don't want to do everything yourself. I.e. On github you have visibility, issues, wiki, easy creation, multi-users, etc. out of the box.
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#16What is the difference between this and Firebase?
Firebase has a much nicer API. It's organized around a realtime, ordered, tree datastore. This makes it much more akin to very granular database than a message bus. Spire is just an authentication service + channels. There is no state beyond the historical list of messages in a channel. That makes it a really thin layer over Socket.IO. Firebase solves a much harder problem of state synchronization. Firebase allows yo…
I am not sure what makes you say it is a thin layer over Socket.IO... or even the comparison to Firebase. I would say Firebase solves a different problem, not really a harder one.
Firebase doesn't have an identity service, does it? Firebase doesn't seem to address the issue of security or privacy at all, which seems to me to be fairly important to a web application.
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#17Sounds like Firebase.
We get compared to other messaging services quite a bit, the big difference is that real-time messaging will not be our only service.
We are already working on other services that will cover the most common needs of developing apps (data store, cdn). The new Identity service combined with real-time messaging and our upcoming services will allow developers to very quickly develop really powerful applications. I don't think that is something businesses exclusively in the real-time messaging space (like firebase) are working towards.
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#18You want me to hand over my entire backend infrastruture to your company and be entirely limited by your capabilites and rewrite my app specifically for your system? Seriously? Are there people actually interested this? Who's the target audience? (I hope you don't say backend developers)
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the start, security has been very important to the spire.io team. That does not seem to be the case with Firebase.
My feeling is that both wants to solve the exact same problem but they decided of a different route to get there. I feel the Firebase way started more as marketting and hype, while Spire.IO is a more traditional minimalistic version of what the real thing could be. (For instance, I could write a real app on spire while it'd be impossible on firebase as there's no authentication system.)
I think Firebase will eventually figure out how to pull off their service. After all, they aren't planning on leaving beta until the end of the year (according to their support rep). It is frustrating though. I really dislike when companies promise solutions to problems they haven't even figured out yet.
Re: Spire.io: A New Platform For Serverless Apps That Work On Web & Mobile
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firebase has a much nicer API. It's organized around a realtime, ordered, tree datastore. This makes it much more akin to very granular database than a message bus. Spire is just an authentication service + channels. There is no state beyond the historical list of messages in a channel. That makes it a really thin layer over Socket.IO. Firebase solves a much harder problem of state synchronization. Firebase allows yo…
I am not sure what makes you say it is a thin layer over Socket.IO... or even the comparison to Firebase. I would say Firebase solves a different problem, not really a harder one. Firebase doesn't have an identity service, does it? Firebase doesn't seem to address the issue of security or privacy at all, which seems to me to be fairly important to a web application.
Also, you can implement data synchronization over a messaging layer but not the other way around. So I'd say our approach is actually more flexible. And we do plan to introduce APIs to make data synchronization easier.