Introduction to Firebase SDK

Get a brief introduction of how your web application's frontend communicates with backend services using Firebase SDK.

Firebase SDK

At some point, a web application’s frontend needs to communicate with backend services. In this course, we will take advantage of Firebase, and in particular, its authentication feature and its NoSQL cloud database Firestore.

Firebase promises the following on their website:

  • Firebase helps mobile and web app teams succeed.
  • It build apps fast, without managing infrastructure.

The second statement matches especially well with the cloud native definition from earlier lessons in this course. On the frontend side, the Firebase SDK allows us to deal with authentication, real-time database updates, and push notifications for our web application.

Alternatives

Let’s explore the alternatives to Firebase SDK.

Supabase

“The open-source Firebase alternative. Supabase adds real-time and restful APIs to Postgres without a single line of code.”

Parse

Parse helps users in building applications faster with object and file storage, user authentication, push notifications, dashboard, and more out of the box.”

Userbase

Userbase is the easiest way to add user accounts and data persistence to your static site. All Userbase features are accessible through a very simple JavaScript SDK, directly from the browser. No backend necessary.”

Why use Firebase?

Firebase takes care of things we do not want to worry about ourselves, at least not until a project is large enough to start worrying about things like security, offline support, real-time syncing, global scale, etc.

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