What is Firebase? For Frontend web developer.
Since the day I started learning about frontend development, I have been listening a lot about backend and I was very fascinated to learn how an end-to-end app works
In my journey of learning frontend development, I don't have any backend developers who I can talk with and learn how the flow goes from frontend to backend and vice-versa.
However, when you are looking to learn frontend technologies quickly, learning about backend can easily give you a sidetrack because trying to learn a whole new set of tech stack will potentially slow down your rate of learning as well as it can be time-consuming because learning about backend consists of server language, database and everything else in between.
It’s not my intention to scare you or I'm saying to you that the backend is bad and all that, Nooo
Learning backend can be really beneficial for us as a frontend developer but that’s not your goal while you are learning frontend development and we would rather focusing on user experience then building backend.
Now if you have decided not to build backend by yourself, Firebase comes to our rescue
What is Firebase?
Firebase is Google-backed applicaion platform that allows developers to build Android, IOS and Web apps. Firebase gives us a whole lot of tool or services that we normally use in our applicaions some of them are Authentication, database and storage, adding these services in our application doesn’t require any backend setup from our end all of these services are hosted on cloud and we can use them by adding client SDK provided by Firebase in our code.
To setup Firebase in our environment firebase give as configuration code and you can begin using the SDKs for the products that you’d like to use, technologies like Firebase are also know as “Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS)”
Services it provide
Let me give you a brief introduction about some of services :-
Authentication- To authenticate users to your app firebase provide auth SDK, nowaday every application wants their users to be authenticated so the app can securely save and serve data of user, firebase supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, popular providers like Google, Facebook and more.
Database- Firebase have cloud-hosted, NoSQL, realtime databases that let data to be stored and synced between users in real time, firebase has two database SDKs Cloud Firestore database and Realtime Database both are real time database, Firestore database can scale as your app grows.
Storage- Cloud storage SDK helps us store and serve user-generated images and videos, storage in firebase is powerful, simple and stores files regardless of network quality, if somehow storing files get some network error it restart where it stopped.
A wide range of services are provided by Firebase and I gave intro to three of them but you can check their other services and best way to learn about them is to hit docs, they have provided great docs, every SDK has built-in functions to quickly use them in code and Firebase in it’s newer version uses modular format in which you add only services your app need and that will reduced the size of SDKs.
Is there any Firebase alternative?
lets discuss some of firebase alternative
Suparbase —open source , SQL
AWS Amplify — open source uses DynamoDB
Nhost — open source and work with GraphQL
Appwrite — open source and databse uses NoSQL
Conclusion
I tried to show how can you use firebase in easy way to quickly done with your app without writing backend, if you are building some side projects and don’t want to include traditional backend you can seriously consider using Firebase or any backend as a service platform.
Thank you for reading!