Intro to Firebase ( 4 minute read )

 Get to Know Firebase under 4 minutes

Firebase, a suite of tools for building apps and managing infrastructure on top of Google Cloud

Platform, was founded by James Tamplin and Andrew Lee in 2011 after they discovered that

developers were using their chat software to manage non-chat application data. This inspired

them to create a real-time database, a JSON database that automatically stays in sync with your

front-end application. It was later expanded to support user authentication and website hosting

to act as a complete backend as a service.

In 2014, it was acquired by Google where it was further expanded with serverless computing

via Cloud Functions, push notifications via Cloud Messaging, and other Google services like

Analytics and AdMob. In order to serve a larger range of applications, Google introduced

Firestore, a new document database, along with the acquisition of Fabric from Twitter in 2017.

The most crucial thing to remember is that Firebase offers software development kits for

almost all platforms, allowing managers to expand and manage this infrastructure with very

little or no back-end code. To build a full stack application, create a free Firebase project, then

open up some code for your favorite front-end platform, install the Firebase SDK, then connect

it to the cloud with your project credentials.

Once initialized, you can start interacting with your backend resources. First, we might want to

know if the user is logged in or not. We can listen to the current user with the on-off state

changed function. The user will be null at first, but we can log them in with their Google

account using the sign-in with pop-up function. Now that we have a user logged in, we might

want to store something in a database.

We can make a reference to a document in Firestore, then write JSON data to it while making a

reference to the current user's user ID. The incredible part is that, by just referencing the

document and utilizing the on Snapshot method, we can listen to modifications to that data in

real time.

Optimistic updates from the box ensure that anytime the data changes on the server, it will be

reflected in the user interface with no lag. However, it doesn';t seem particularly safe. How can

we limit who is able to access the database? Using Common Expression Language, you may

build access control logic for Firestore security rules in an easily understandable style.

You can do almost everything from the front end, but when you do need to run server-side

code, Firebase Cloud Functions provides a tightly integrated serverless backend. Not only does

it allow you to create HTTP endpoints, but functions can also be triggered in the background

based on events that happen in your project like writes to the database, user authentication

events, file uploads, and many others.When developing locally, Firebase has an emulator suite to run and test your code in a mock environment. When it's time to deploy, run the Firebase deploy command to push your code to the cloud and allocate infrastructure to run it at any scale.