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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

#131

Post by bikamonki »

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…

Firebase is awesome! Realtime has become a great selling point with my clients (and a necessity for things like chat apps). However, after doing over 20 apps with Firebase I've had to combine with other PAAS due to some features missing/lacking: server-side code (event-driven like Parse had or like AWS Lambda) and better/easier search features. In the second case for instance, let's imagine a support app, it makes more sense to use a traditional SQL DB for objects like tickets, customers, etc while using Firebase for a realtime chat inside a ticket. Even a hosted Non-SQL with some good collection search feature is a better fit rather than using Firebase.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#135

Post by marknadal »

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…

Another: http://gun.js.org/ & https://github.com/amark/gun

Realtime, Peer-to-Peer, Offline-First, Graph.

A podcast on its performance (25+M ops/sec) just happened on http://readthesource.io/ an hour or so ago, hangouts link: http://youtu.be/70dn1oZQFCk?a .

MIT / ZLIB / Apache 2 license - do whatever you want with it.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#136

Post by mbleigh »

oceankid wrote: post #90

The thought of reliable, managed hosting is interesting. But how does one extend an app outside storing and fetching data? What if you want to run a background job to send emails, parse a complex csv or create a custom pdf and write to firebase storage?

Firebase projects are deeply integrated with Google Cloud, so you can spin up backend resources such as Google Cloud Functions, App Engine, and Compute Engine. Using the Node.js server SDK you can watch for changes in the Firebase Database and act on them. We're thoughtfully considering more holistic ways we can help here.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#137

Post by mbleigh »

Blixz wrote: post #24

So, Still no offline persistence for JS. What a huge disappointment.

Check out my I/O talk on Friday (Progressive Web Apps on Firebase). While the Firebase Web SDK doesn't support persistent offline just yet, we do have some new ways to get the job done.

https://events.google.com/io2016/schedule?filters=Firebase&s...

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#138

Post by EGreg »

hiphipjorge wrote: post #111
guelo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#139

Post by csmajorfive »

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.

They probably won't.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#140

Post by primitivesuave »

samastur wrote: post #58
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…

We are not missing the point. Some of us just happen to value other things more than convenience. There's no shortage of discontinued products that were cancelled even though a lot of effort and money was poured into them. Amount previously invested is a sunk cost and shouldn't even matter when deciding if continue a service/product or not. Just because you have already dig a hole doesn't mean you should keep digging…

This is a good point. However, products are usually discontinued because they no longer fit in with the core business of the acquirer. In this case, Google is making a clear statement that Firebase will be an integral part of the Google Cloud experience for everyone (hobbyists all the way to apps at scale).
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