What is Firebase?

First, let’s take a look at the Introducing section of Firebase!

To answer the question of what Firebase is, let’s go back to 2011, before Firebase was born. The predecessor to the Firebase platform is Envolve. Envolve reaches users as a startup model, they provide users with APIs to easily integrate chat features into websites. However, users use Envolve to transfer app data, not just instant messaging. This led the developers of Envolve to decide to separate the chat system and the real-time architecture.

Firebase is a versatile application development platform for mobile and website.

And in 2012, Firebase was born as a Backend-as-a-Service with real-time functionality. After being acquired by Google in 2014, Firebase quickly evolved into today’s versatile web and mobile application development platform. This platform is the combination of cloud with Google’s server system to focus on two objects:

• Develop & test your app : develop and test designed applications.
• Grow & engage your audience : Analyze data and optimize the user experience.

Firebase provides us with simple, powerful and cross-platform APIs for managing and using the database, so now we just need to call the API and the server part has Firebase take care of!

Outstanding services

Firebase is a versatile platform that offers a wide variety of services to its users. But when it comes to this platform, people still think of some outstanding services such as:

1. Real-time Database

Realtime database service allows users to store and synchronize data in real time. This service is stored directly on iCloud. In case your devices are offline, they will use up the device’s memory and automatically sync to the server when the device is online. So you can rest assured about the interaction.

2. Authentication

Authentication service provides your application with a number of authentication methods via email, password, phone number, Google account, Facebook account … With this feature, users will easily build login without separate registration data is required. Extremely convenient and fast, right?

3. Firebase cloud messaging

Firebase was built with chat primitives. So Firebase cloud messaging (FCM) is the most basic feature of this platform, it allows users to build chat applications and push notifications to many different devices such as web, Android, iOS … Highlights of This service is hardly any coding involved! FCM is fully integrated with Firebase Analytics, giving you detailed engagement and conversion tracking during usage.

Moreover, the FCM service also helps you to choose whether to send the message immediately or at a future time according to the user’s local time zone. And there are many other interesting customizations waiting for you to explore.

4. Firebase database query

One of Firebase’s standout services is that it can help you simplify the data retrieval process instead of going through complicated SQL statements. However, setting up a query language at Firebase is quite difficult, to do it, you need to build a very accurate database.

5. Remote Config

Remote Config helps you to do 2 basic tasks:

• Update apps quickly and easily without publishing new builds to the app / play store.
• You can easily set up the activity segment in the application based on the device requirement or the user who is using it.

To do that, Firebase will install server-side parameters that help users update data immediately whether it is to change the layout, color scheme or a specific part of the application. This is very useful because regular applications will lose their installation completely if the user removes the application. If they want to install on many different applications, they will have to manually configure the settings on each device so that it is the same. This process is quite complicated and takes a lot of time.

In addition, Firebase has many other useful services that you can experience to explore for yourself. Based on the above article, do you understand what Firebase is? It cannot be denied that this platform has brought a lot of benefits to users in the process of developing mobile and web applications. Learning about it will give you a better background in related projects and work!

References:

1. https://firebase.google.com/
2. https://firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database?gclid=Cj0KCQjwutaCBhDfARIsAJHWnHv-GBf_590b0lfN6_Aoe00Sl8LghYqLgo-lYIaPcTWIle0FlowshfwaAoKXEALw_w
3. https://firebase.google.com/products/auth?gclid=Cj0KCQjwutaCBhDfARIsAJHWnHtM80CaWIB2S-3r1WX1mZcB9PvUzkI-GO91voMOBb2ufKJcIiCmoRMaAmd_EALgw_wcBaw&
4. https://firebase.google.com/products/cloud-messaging?gclid=Cj0KCQjwutaCBhDfARIsAJHWnHv3Oap9Nkhxp4zsR55S7F5i8V5pmHlWH8WHNzLqHVFfK6GSCDG8bYEaAsc=WEALw_
5. https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/js/firebase.database.Query
6. https://firebase.google.com/products/remote-config?gclid=Cj0KCQjwutaCBhDfARIsAJHWnHva3WJ1xT3Wjgj9UNgetmCoTsPTXvN0XVCT0dYmSqPbGohJWIbUmT0aAlcjawsALw_w