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I've often looked at and played with Firebase since it does so much of what I need to back a React Native-based app for simple mobile games and utilities. I alw
by zinckiwi 7y ago
I've often looked at and played with Firebase since it does so much of what I need to back a React Native-based app for simple mobile games and utilities. I always end up talking myself out of it due to Google's history of pulling the plug on (what seem to an outsider to be) perfectly good, stable products that wouldn't do any harm to keep around indefinitely.
As a hobbyist, I wouldn't have the time or motivation to completely rewrite a project if that happened, which would be necessary since a Firebase app (like a heavily AWS-integrated serverless app) is not just technologically but architecturally tied to that environment.
- PKop 7y agoThis seems more applicable to consumer products, not business / cloud services, though I imagine I might be overlooking something.
- zinckiwi 7y agoThat's a fair observation. I do go back and forth but in the end it's enough to swing me, in the principle-of-least-regret way.
- xchaotic 7y agoSo what do you use as the backend for now?
- zinckiwi 7y agoI usually go with a Django or RoR monolith, something that I know I can run on a cheap DO droplet or similar, and while there's a fixed monthly cost it's reasonable and I can scale up with ease (albeit manually). If I were explicitly needing the realtime DB aspect I'd probably look to Phoenix with the same hardware approach.
- ufmace 7y agoIt seems like a pretty reasonable concern to me. We can presume the odds are pretty low, yeah. But the consequences are very high - you would need to redesign and possibly rewrite in another language your entire application. People complained up a storm about Reader dying, but it was a 5min process to export your subscriptions and import into another web reader that had basically the same feature set. Conventional Linux hosting, or even Docker, could be pretty easily re-hosted as-is on any of hundreds of other places.
- anderspitman 7y agoIt would be nice if there was a dead-simple Firebase-like tool you could self-host. ie just a single instance that you could point all your toy apps at to give them a little real-time persistence.
- tmb 7y agoParse was a Firebase competitor that got bought by Facebook and later open sourced, I don’t know if it’s dead simple though. https://parseplatform.org/ https://parseplatform.org/
- amjd 7y agoAround the time that Parse (mentioned by sibling) was killed and open sourced, a lot of open source Firebase-like solutions had sprung up, some of which are listed here: https://github.com/relatedcode/ParseAlternatives#open-source-solutions https://github.com/relatedcode/ParseAlternatives#open-source...