Quick Intro to Firebase.
We have a huge number of websites and applications running all over the globe. Well, I got an idea just now, why not build it right away. Wait. Should I ask someone to build it? Is it that hard? If that’s the case, Firebase has you covered.
If you’re the enterprising sort of person that tackles humanity’s urgent needs with a mobile app or a website, you’ll be more than happy after learning Firebase.
Firebase is a toolset to “build, improve, and grow your app”, and the tools it gives you cover a large portion of the services that developers would normally have to build themselves, but don’t want to build, because they’d rather be focusing on the app experience itself. This includes things like analytics, authentication, databases, configuration, file storage, push messaging, and the list goes on. The services are hosted in the cloud and scale with little to no effort on the part of the developer.
It provides a set of tools which gives a full suite for app development. It provides NoSQL database and is based on Node.js and thus it provides realtime syncing with multiple devices or chat applications.
Firebase provides us with all the necessary features required to build the best applications and ease the works. Some of the major features are-
- Authentication — user login and identity.
- Realtime database — realtime, cloud hosted, NoSQL database, large JSON tree to store simple data.
- Cloud Firestore — realtime, cloud hosted, NoSQL database, less denormalization and data flattening, data in documents arranged in collections.
- Cloud Storage — serverless, event driven backend.
- Firebase Hosting — global web hosting.
- ML kit — SDK for common ML tasks.
It also provides us with major analytics tools to grow our project furthermore, they are-
- Analytics — understand your users and how they use your app.
- Predictions — apply machine learning to analytics to predict user behavior.
- Cloud Messaging — send messages and notifications to users.
- Remote Config — customize your app without deploying a new version.
- A/B Testing — run marketing and usability experiments to see what works best.
- Dynamic Links — enable native app conversations, user sharing, and marketing campaigns.
- App Indexing — re-engage users with Google Search Integration.
- In-App Messaging — engage your active users with targeted messages.
Firebase is very powerful and easy to use. It does everything with ease and with limited lines of code. It’s free to use unless you want features like Test Labs(which runs on a custom test scripts on thousands of configured devices and provides complete feedback) or increased cloud storage space which is not usually required until you have a huge user base.
And here comes the best part, it is multiplatform and hence the developer can easily maintain and analyze the centralized database. You can also head over to Firebase docs to integrate your project with the firebase. Google also provides quick codelabs about how to integrate it and work flawlessly with Firebase.
P.S.
- Firebase is a platform, not (just) a database (anymore). We already covered this.
- It’s Firebase, not FireBase. If you write it that way, you’ll be punched in the throat.
- Similarly, it’s “Firestore”, not “FireStore”, but the punch goes to the kidney.
- It’s NEVER abbreviated FB. Do that, and you’ll be yelled at until your ears bleed.
- If Firebase was an element, it would combat fluorine for the symbol F.
- It’s “realtime”, not “real-time”, despite the suggestion of your grammar checker.
- It’s “Cloud Functions for Firebase”, not “Firebase Functions”. Go ahead, search the docs and prove me wrong. I dare you.
- It’s “Cloud Firestore”, not “Firebase Firestore”. Seriously, who needs that much fire??
- Cloud Firestore is not Cloud Filestore is not Cloud Datastore is not Cloud Memorystore is not Cloud Storage. Got it?
- Chill, you got this!!
If you’re interested to know more and deep dive into the super beneficial services provided by firebase. You can register for the Firebase Summit happening on 26th September 2019.
