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(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming”
by mayop100 10y ago
(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : )
We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote configuration, updates to auth, etc. Perhaps more important though are the new solutions for later in your app’s lifecycle. We’ve added analytics, crash reporting, dynamic linking, and a bunch more so that we can continue to support you after you’ve built and launched your app too.
I'd suggest reading the blog post for more info:
https://firebase.googleblog.com/2016/05/firebase-expands-to-become-unified-app-platform.html https://firebase.googleblog.com/2016/05/firebase-expands-to-...
This is the first cut of a lot of new features, and we’re eager to hear what the Hacker News community thinks. I look forward to your comments!
- _kyran 10y agoLooks great! It will certainly be filling the void that Parse's departue left. Google already offered a lot more more than other platforms (ios) in terms of analytics and this just makes that gap even bigger.
- plexicle 10y agoHello there. I love Firebase. Use it every day. The one big request I've always had was to be able to grab the client's IP address on request. Is that possible with this new Firebase and GCE integration? I have many Firebase apps. Most of them have an intermediate server solely for this one reason.
- mayop100 10y agoThis isn't something we support out of the box yet, but I'll definitely discuss this with the team. Thanks for the feedback!
- velohx 10y agoThat's a feature I would also really like. I also use an intermediate server (ipify.org) to get the IP address. The only reason I need the IP address is to throttle users. If adjustable throttling was baked into the platform and not require me to write logic to handle it, that would be sweet too.
- struct 10y agoCongratulations on the release! It'll tale a while to digest the truck-load of new stuff you've got :D
- larrykubin 10y agoThanks so much, I love your product and am developing on it right now. When Parse got shut down, I got a bit nervous, but the Firebase updates give me reassurance that it is here to stay.
- jkscm 10y agowill user be able to opt out of tracking? Like Do-Not-Track
- robotnoises 10y agoNew dashboard look & feel is awesome. Lots to digest from that short keynote, but I'm excited to see Google double-down on its investment (Hi, Facebook). Looks like https://console.firebase.google.com https://console.firebase.google.com is getting slammed. All of my attempted imports are failing.
- mayop100 10y agoYeah, sorry about that! We're working to get more capacity ASAP. The response has been incredible.
- robotnoises 10y agoI assume you just pulled a comically-large lever in your office, because it just worked! Thanks, and congrats.
- blizkreeg 10y agoI'm actually not seeing my current projects at https://console.firebase.google.com/ https://console.firebase.google.com/ and I have two (one sandbox, one prod). Is this due to the over-capacity? They're just not listed under "Projects using Firebase".
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- mybigsword 10y agoYou should never use products like this where you are completely vendor-locked and will be unable to switch easily to another provider. I did this mistake before and we used SQL Azure Federations (cool & cheap autosharding for SQL Server), then Microsoft decided to discontinue it and provide only very expensive up-scale version of SQL Server instead. We spend months to migrate our product to PostgreSQL... and this is just an example, Google also love to discontinue products, probably even more than Microsoft.
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- pritambarhate 10y agoI did this mistake with Parse. The open source version released doesn't have full features and we have run into a few bugs which created a lot of issues. It's better to stick with open source stack. I like what Amazon is doing with AWS with services like RDS and ElastiCache. If one carefully selects the services on AWS, there is almost zero vendor lock in. Google also had hiked the AppEngine price in Sept. 2011 which caused a lot of problems to early adopters.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago> It's better to stick with open source stack. This is a hard lesson each person learns on their own.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThe difference is actually between a product and a service. A service is something that another party provides, and that may - actually, they most definitely will - at some point stop providing, for various reasons. You want to minimize your dependence on any services - especially ones that are not trivially replaceable or that don't come with contractual agreements to cover your costs in case of the service being shut down. That's why I hate the whole SaaS idea - it turns products into services; something that should be permanent (as long as you can maintain the hardware it runs) into something that is ephemeral and ever changing. It's great for the service provider, but it totally sucks for the customers. SaaS drives entropy in the computing universe.
- pritambarhate 10y agoIs there an Open Source version of Firebase which we can use on our own hardware if we wish to? Vendor lock-in is the biggest fear I have with Firebase. Like Facebook (Parse), if Google also decides that Firebase is not profitable and decides to close down, how do we run our applications without rewriting? How do we protect ourselves, if Google decides to increase the price of Firebase 3-4 times in a single day? Even just a public pledge from Google saying that they will open source the full featured Firebase if they decide to close down the devision will go a long way to alleviate this fear.
- csmajorfive 10y agoI think it's less likely to happen here because Google is investing heavily in building a business around developer services.
- mybigsword 10y agoI cannot agree with that. Google Cloud services are way too small comparing to AWS or Azure and they don't make a lot of money with it. They can discontinue it easily.
- williamstein 10y ago+1 -- Sometimes Google does embrace open source in building services that I can trust longterm, e.g., Kubernetes. I wish Firebase (which I won't use) were being built and marketed in a similar way to Kubernetes (which I will use).
- velohx 10y agoThis is sarcasm, right? Here's some more equivalent sarcasm: Gmail and Google Search could discontinue easily.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoSearch, hardly. But Gmail? What happens when Google decides they're not monetizing Gmail sufficiently and force everyone to Inbox? What then!
- taytus 10y agoI was on the fence about using Firebase for my new project...I'm no in the fence anymore! Congrats, this looks awesome!
- dang 10y agoWe changed the URL to that blog post from https://firebase.google.com/ https://firebase.google.com/, since it gives the background.
- hackergary 10y agoAs a mobile (web) developer. How well does it work with React Native, and compare with Realm JS and the new Horizon from RethinkDB?
- mayop100 10y agoFor React Native, we're working on updating our libraries as soon as possible. I haven't worked with Horizon, so I can't provide thoughts there.
- toddmorey 10y agoWould love, love for Firebase to have a service similar to AWS Lambda to manipulate and transform data without having to maintain persistent servers.
- wasd 10y agoYou can use any Google Cloud product with Firebase so you have access to Cloud Functions. https://cloud.google.com/functions/ https://cloud.google.com/functions/
- rapind 10y agoI've been eyeing this. Can we kick off a Cloud Function via Firebase Cloud Messaging?
- wasd 10y agoSorry, I don't know. I don't really use Firebase.
- crashedsnow 10y agoHey.. PM for Cloud Functions here. Short answer is no (well.. not without an intermediate proxy of some sort), but we're in the process of providing direct integration with Cloud Functions across many of the services that fall under the Firebase umbrella. So stay tuned!
- rapind 10y agoThat will be awesome! We're running background jobs on a VPS right now and figured we could change that to a Firebase Queue -> Self hosted Director / Proxy service -> Google Pub / Sub -> Google Cloud Functions. Obviously the more direct route would save us some complexity!
- jasan 10y agoThe blaze plan does state full google cloud integration. But I dont think google cloud functions can be directly triggered with firebase
- siong1987 10y agoFor Authentication, it will be cool to have something like Twitter Digits(https://get.digits.com/ https://get.digits.com/) or Facebook Account Kit(https://developers.facebook.com/docs/accountkit https://developers.facebook.com/docs/accountkit), which is basically SMS authentication without password.
- messel 10y agoHuge feature set, thanks. Any news on deeper/more complex queries (chaining, or something like joins without rewriting our data in multiple places) Or faster queries (server side I've seen some very slow .once calls taking hundreds of ms)? Also I'd love some tips on how to better scale listener/trigger functions. I have many listeners (server side) and am migrating them to explicit client endpoint point functions to handle it horizontally (more api workers).
- bikamonki 10y agoFirebase is awesome! Realtime has become a great selling point with my clients (and a necessity for things like chat apps). However, after doing over 20 apps with Firebase I've had to combine with other PAAS due to some features missing/lacking: server-side code (event-driven like Parse had or like AWS Lambda) and better/easier search features. In the second case for instance, let's imagine a support app, it makes more sense to use a traditional SQL DB for objects like tickets, customers, etc while using Firebase for a realtime chat inside a ticket. Even a hosted Non-SQL with some good collection search feature is a better fit rather than using Firebase.
- oaktowner 10y agoGoogle PM here. You might want to look at Google Cloud's storage offerings (both SQL and non-SQL based), as well as its compute offerings (including Cloud Functions, which is event driven). One note: Cloud Functions was just announced and is still in alpha.
- bikamonki 10y agoI am aware of the suggested services; however, the ideal would be to have them seamlessly integrated to Firebase.
- nihonde 10y agoThis is good news for me. File storage and push messaging are particularly nice. As a user of the Firebase iOS SDK, I was wondering why the SDK was getting so stale. The Quickstart guide used deprecated Swift, didn't offer Carthage support, etc. I looked at the new docs, and I guess they ditched the old Quickstart format in favor of a bunch of examples. At least the code seems to be up to date, which is somewhat encouraging. I still wish for Carthage support, though. I see a lot of people worrying about reliance on proprietary BaaS. I had services running on Parse when it announced the shutdown, and it really wasn't that hard to migrate. Firebase should be even easier to leave if necessary, since it's basically just a NoSQL data model. If you abstract your queries and avoid some bells and whistles, you can keep everything in one place for a relatively painless move that hopefully will never become necessary.
- asciimike 10y agoFirebase iOS engineer here: First off, I'm glad you like the new feature additions. We'd love to hear your feedback on Storage and FCM :) Secondly, I'd love Carthage support as well, but there are a few things (built into Carthage) that prevent us from adding this: 1. Carthage requires iOS 8+ (dynamic frameworks only). Firebase supports 7+, and we build static "frameworks", so we'd lose that (which is still relevant in a lot of our developers). 2. Carthage is designed for open source (git based origins only), and while we'd love to get there, we currently ship everything as a pre-built framework.
- nihonde 10y agoUnderstood. Dependency management for iOS is generally pretty terrible, in my experience. I suppose Apple will step in soon, and I hope they do a nice job of it. Anyway, I continue to use (and enjoy using) Firebase for iOS and web.
- calebm 10y agoNice job with Firebase! I've got a friend who is an entry-level front-end developer, and he was able to develop this grocery list app with Firebase on his own: https://collaboralist.github.io/ https://collaboralist.github.io/ (source code: https://github.com/KidIcarus1337/collaboralist https://github.com/KidIcarus1337/collaboralist), attesting to Firebase's claim of providing a Backend-as-a-Service.
- joeyspn 10y agoCongrats on the launch. What about hybrid (ionic/cordova/phonegap) apps? Any chance you'll be adding support via an official plugin? Firebase has been a popular choice for backend, but now there's no clear way (at least as reflected in the current docs) to take advantage of all the offer (FCM, testing, etc).
- nathan_f77 10y agoThis is amazing, I'll probably be using Firebase for my next mobile app. I had a great experience with Parse, and I think their shutdown has left a big void. It looks like Firebase is filling that void, and then some. I'm wondering if you might be able to speak candidly about this whole acquire => shutdown pattern? Why will Google choose to keep running Firebase, instead of shuttering it and getting you guys to work on something else? And do you have any thoughts on why Facebook might have wanted to shut down Parse?
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