What is Firebase? | What do you need, to use Firebase?

In this article, I want to talk about Firebase. So what will we deal with? We will deal with "What is firebase?", "where it can be used?" and "What do you need to learn in order to master the firebase?", what is its close competition, and how good actually the firebase is? So let's get started here.

Let's move on our answer the question that we are having but in order to answer that question first, we need to ask a proper question. So what is the question here? When you design apps like mobile apps, iOS or Android, or maybe web applications, the database is kind of a big problem, and not because it's hard to design of course it's a little bit tricky to design as well as sometimes it consumes a lot of bandwidth at trafficking between a database and your application frontend is a big issue. On top of that, the hostage is again a problem. Imagine if your app is having photo-sharing things and you want to access all the photos there, so it's not easy to maintain all of these things.

On top of that managing, your own authentication system is also a tricky bit idea because everybody needs authentication from Facebook maybe Twitter, maybe Google or even a simple login system is not easy to design from scratch. Of course, it is possible but it's not easy to design.

Firebase

Now what Firebase gives you? It gives you a complete solution about how things can be taken down. Now it's a very good complete backend solution that you can put up there. With Firebase, you can do all sorts of authentication most common ones are by username, Email, and password and of course, you can choose to log in with Twitter, log in with Facebook or log in with Google accounts and GitHub, and all the things that you can imagine which are most popular there.

Apart from authentication it also manages the very good problem of database. It gives us a real-time database and by real-time, I literally mean real type, as soon as the user clicked in and you have a written code the database entry should be done there. It does it in real-time you can just see the things magically appear there and that is very very awesome for debugging and rolling out increased levels in your application.

So this is not about authentication and database (yes it does the job really neatly nicely and awesomely) it can do a lot of other things as well like cloud messaging, app notification, your advertisement programs and there are chances of things that we can see in the featured page there.
Again I would say "I love Firebase" and in case you might have attended some of my boot camps in iOS or maybe React I always like to use Firebase.

Competition of Firebase

Another close competition of Facebook is Firebase. Now you might have seen that Parse was really really growing and in fact one of those close followers of the parse. Parse really did a very good job but somehow Facebook decided that we are not going to work on this project and the team that was working on the parse wanted to dedicate that team to some different good things.

I don't know what they come up with that good things I think that was probably just for the fun purpose or maybe that team designed a kind of a Snapchat clone inside WhatsApp. But again that was not all about it. Parse is a very good competition for Firebase but now things are changed, now it's not like Facebook has completely closed down the Parse.

It has actually moved to the open-source and now in order to use the Parse you have to take your own Amazon Web Services, and AWS servers there and host your Parse yourself. And you have to maintain it on your own.

The good part about the parse is you get much more control there but the good what about the Firebase is you don't have to even look out for your database and manage bandwidth and everything, you don't have to do anything. Everything is being given to you.

For the small-scale apps, I think that Firebase takes in upper hand because for small-scale apps from 100 to 200 thousand users, it can manage flawlessly everything, and in case your app is having more than a hundred thousand users you probably would have money to pay for the bigger plans as well.

What do you need to use Firebase ?

So this was the quick overview of the firebase. One more important question before I go out of this article, what do you need to learn in order to master the firebase ??? You do not need to learn anything. Yes, I am saying correctly you do not need to learn anything. If you are working in swift you can use it in the Swift language as well it has a complete API that works in swift if you are an Android developer you can use that in Android there are specific guidelines for Android as well. Similarly, in case you are working on javascript based application, then you can use the entire Firebase in javascript.

So you do not need to learn anything, your current working language is enough to use Firebase. There are APIs in most languages, you just have to call the code, update the database, do authentication, and all such stuff there.