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Introducing Firebase Hosting

firebase.com

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Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#41

Post by marknutter »

stevetjoa wrote: post #29

Would someone here kindly be able to comment about the usability of Parse vs. Firebase vs. AWS JS SDK? I've looked into all three. They seem comparable because they are "no-backend" solutions and NoSQL stores. It seems like the AWS JS SDK is the youngest, least mature (there are surprisingly few results on Google), and perhaps most difficult to use, but it's sure nice that I can manage my existing AWS stuff with a cl…

I've used both Parse and Firebase extensively and I love them both. Parse is far more mature. Not only has it been around for longer but it's owned by Facebook so it has the resources to continue adding amazing stuff, like Cloud Code. Cloud Code is a huge differentiator in my opinion because it takes care of the last mile for BAAS' (back-end(s) as a service) - custom server-side data validation and manipulation.

However, Parse's SDK follows a very Backbone-like syntax with setters and getters which I'm not all that thrilled with (as an Angular developer) and has no real-time functionality to speak of (outside of push notifications). That's where Firebase shines. Firebase is newer but is maturing very quickly. Their system is solid and pretty much "solves" realtime for all intents and purposes. They don't have a Cloud Code equivalent and search is pretty much non-existent at this point but those are solvable problems I'm sure they will tackle in the not-so-distant future.

What it comes down to is what type of app you're building. And by the way, there's no reason you can combine them to get the best of both worlds :)

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#42

Post by marknutter »

This solves a major headache for me. I have a production app built using Angular and Firebase and I was up until this point using Amazon S3 hosting to host my static assets. It was a beautiful thing - I don't have to maintain any server side code. But it was annoying having to deal with Amazon and their stale, obtuse documentation. I will definitely be moving my static files over to Firebase. It's one less service I have to worry about.

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#43

Post by amirvaliani »

What about bots (search engines, social media bots, etc.)? If a web app has both static content and dynamic content (based on data in the firebase db) how can bots see a rendered version of the page. Do you have a way / plan for users to install middleware to check for bots and if so return pre-rendered content. ( Middleware details: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8k8JuuU... ). Thanks in advance!

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#44

Post by mikelehen »

amirvaliani wrote: post #43

What about bots (search engines, social media bots, etc.)? If a web app has both static content and dynamic content (based on data in the firebase db) how can bots see a rendered version of the page. Do you have a way / plan for users to install middleware to check for bots and if so return pre-rendered content. ( Middleware details: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8k8JuuU... ). Thanks in advance…

Great question. This is a very real pain point with dynamic content in today's world of bots / crawlers. Many sites right now are completely or partially invisible to crawlers.

As you point out, pre-rendering content is the prescribed way to solve this and there are some existing solutions (prerender.io, brombone, etc.) that are a good start, but this is still a confusing / hard problem for people to solve when they'd like to focus on building their app instead.

So we're keenly looking into how we can best integrate with these sorts of services or provide our own solution as part of our hosting offering. Stay tuned!

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#45

Post by bravura »

marknutter wrote: post #41
stevetjoa wrote: post #29

Would someone here kindly be able to comment about the usability of Parse vs. Firebase vs. AWS JS SDK? I've looked into all three. They seem comparable because they are "no-backend" solutions and NoSQL stores. It seems like the AWS JS SDK is the youngest, least mature (there are surprisingly few results on Google), and perhaps most difficult to use, but it's sure nice that I can manage my existing AWS stuff with a cl…

I've used both Parse and Firebase extensively and I love them both. Parse is far more mature. Not only has it been around for longer but it's owned by Facebook so it has the resources to continue adding amazing stuff, like Cloud Code. Cloud Code is a huge differentiator in my opinion because it takes care of the last mile for BAAS' (back-end(s) as a service) - custom server-side data validation and manipulation. Howe…

Could you please elaborate more, perhaps through example, of apps where either parse or firebase would be clearly superior?

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#46

Post by aoberoi »

marknutter wrote: post #41
stevetjoa wrote: post #29

Would someone here kindly be able to comment about the usability of Parse vs. Firebase vs. AWS JS SDK? I've looked into all three. They seem comparable because they are "no-backend" solutions and NoSQL stores. It seems like the AWS JS SDK is the youngest, least mature (there are surprisingly few results on Google), and perhaps most difficult to use, but it's sure nice that I can manage my existing AWS stuff with a cl…

I've used both Parse and Firebase extensively and I love them both. Parse is far more mature. Not only has it been around for longer but it's owned by Facebook so it has the resources to continue adding amazing stuff, like Cloud Code. Cloud Code is a huge differentiator in my opinion because it takes care of the last mile for BAAS' (back-end(s) as a service) - custom server-side data validation and manipulation. Howe…

Firebase may not have Cloud Code, but since you have use their npm module and deploy to a free hosting service like Heroku, I actually think its more powerful. The big win: once you are in a full node.js environment you can leverage the power of all the npm modules. Parse's Cloud Code is very isolated from the entire ecosystem.

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#47

Post by amirvaliani »

mikelehen wrote: post #44
amirvaliani wrote: post #43

What about bots (search engines, social media bots, etc.)? If a web app has both static content and dynamic content (based on data in the firebase db) how can bots see a rendered version of the page. Do you have a way / plan for users to install middleware to check for bots and if so return pre-rendered content. ( Middleware details: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8k8JuuU... ). Thanks in advance…

Great question. This is a very real pain point with dynamic content in today's world of bots / crawlers. Many sites right now are completely or partially invisible to crawlers. As you point out, pre-rendering content is the prescribed way to solve this and there are some existing solutions (prerender.io, brombone, etc.) that are a good start, but this is still a confusing / hard problem for people to solve when they'…

Ok. Great. Glad you are aware of the problem and evaluating solutions. Thanks!
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