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Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

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11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

#11
post #5

This is quite nice. Before we ( https://www.tesla.im ) switched to Firebase we had (still have) our own realtime system built with NodeJS, Websockets, Amazon SQS (as backup to ensure messages don't get lost) and a RIAK cluster.

Just to clarify things a bit; our setup worked fine. The only reason we switched to Firebase was, being a small team, we didnt want to maintain all those servers.

Re: Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

#13
post #11
post #5

This is quite nice. Before we ( https://www.tesla.im ) switched to Firebase we had (still have) our own realtime system built with NodeJS, Websockets, Amazon SQS (as backup to ensure messages don't get lost) and a RIAK cluster.

Just to clarify things a bit; our setup worked fine. The only reason we switched to Firebase was, being a small team, we didnt want to maintain all those servers.

Sounds cool, have you thought about open sourcing what you have buid?

Re: Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

#14
post #8

> (As an aside, it seems that it would work most of the time in most of environments that I'd try, but for some reason, it rarely worked in one). So I needed to find a new solution. 'Instead of debugging the one environment, I'll just reimplement the entire service!' Obviously. :-)

Well, it might also have something to do with money or control, as Firebase is SaaS, and this solution is open source software. https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html

As an aside, what happens with FireBase when you need more than 30GB of storage in a single app?

Re: Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

#15
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it might also have something to do with money or control, as Firebase is SaaS, and this solution is open source software. https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html

As an aside, what happens with FireBase when you need more than 30GB of storage in a single app?

You switch to the Inferno plan (scroll down! :P) and then on to Enterprise plans (or just pay overages, though I'm not sure if they apply to disk?)

Re: Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

#16
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, what happens with FireBase when you need more than 30GB of storage in a single app?

You switch to the Inferno plan (scroll down! :P) and then on to Enterprise plans (or just pay overages, though I'm not sure if they apply to disk?)

Ah, thanks. The fold looked like a complete page to me!

Regardless, I still find the potential lock-in costs and issues incurred with a proprietary datastore like FireBase to be a total and complete deal breaker.

For truly production-grade systems, relinquishing control over your data stores does not seem like a viable path to better reliability or control for any business with significantly large swaths of data.

If there were a compatible open-source equivalent with easy import functionality for a FireBase dump, I'd be singing a different tune.

Am I missing or overlooking something here? I get the use case for a small project or app, but for mission-critical production, it doesn't seem like a good idea.

Re: Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

#17

Pretty cool project! I remember the pleasure I got out of (partially) re-implementing the Pusher API. I wonder why real-time features aren't more popular? Real-time order status, live-updating maps, the list goes on!

I think they're not that popular because the potential revenue lift for implementing the features you listed does not seem significant.

Re: Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

#20
post #19

I don't want to sound negative towards you project, but why not use CouchDB [0], along with TouchDB [1] for mobiles and PouchDB [2] for the browser ? [0] https://couchdb.apache.org/ [1] http://touchdb.org/ [2] http://pouchdb.com/

There is no project... just experimentation with LevelDB. All of those solutions that you provided require an installation of CouchDB on the server side. Therefore, a bit out of scope of building a quick hacky Firebase clone using LevelDB modules.
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