I've been reading about Firebase and playing with it for a short while. The idea (BAAS) and implementation are impressive, and having programmed with Javascript it seems a viable choice. Not having to deal with scaling and other server side concerns makes it even more attractive.
My question is: generally speaking, is Firebase a first class back-end candidate for any average data-based application? e.g. billing, CRM, e-commerce, social, location based, etc. I do not include super light or heavy extremes such as a basic chat, or a nuclear plant monitor...
The answer may not be a clear yes/no, but was it built to support the general application space, or just stand out as a real-time read/write data service?
Would appreciate answers based on experience and existing production applications.
Thanks
Yes, Firebase is intended to be a first class back-end for any data based Web, iOS or Android application. The service offers real-time data reads and writes, but also comes with a powerful and flexible security system that allows you to write secure client-only apps, without needing any server code to enforce data boundaries.
There are several apps in production listed on the front page as customer and on the app showcase page on https://firebase.google.com/customers/
Firebase is now more capable and is considered as a full stand-alone back-end, especially after the introduction of cloud function. https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/
Firebase may not have support for transaction spanning multiple business objects.
e.g. When a sales order is booked then it needs to update inventory for multiple items, update billing in receivables, give sales credit to multiple sales persons etc.
Firebase team is supposed to come up with a database trigger option which will make all these happen.
Related
I've never used Firebase (or Firestore) before and I'm considering using it for my new mobile application. And I'm wondering if using Firebase only, without any additional server is a good idea. Firestore does a lot of things I guess, like authentication, security and scalability. So I really hesitate putting an another server into Architecture. But I have a plan to do many server-side stuffs like searching for text or calculating something.
I think the answer is "it depends", but I want to hear some advices from people who have used Firebase before about this topic. Thank you in advance!
Is it a good idea to use an additional server with Google Firebase?
Firebase will help you build apps fast, without managing infrastructure. So you'll be able to focus on your app development and not on how to maintain servers. Perhaps, if you have requirments that Firebase cannot handle, which I doubt it, you can use an additional server.
I've never used Google Firebase (or Firestore) before and I'm considering using it for my new mobile application.
If you have never used the Firebase suite, I recommend you get started by reading the official documentation. Before starting to use Cloud Firestore, I recommend first get more familiar with NoSQL databases.
And I'm wondering if using Firebase only, without any additional server is a good idea.
There are many apps out there that are not using any other server than Firebase.
Firestore does a lot of things I guess, like authentication, security and scalability.
Firestore is a scalable NoSQL cloud database that allow you to store and sync data for client- and server-side development. It does not authenticate users. For that, there is another product named Firebase Authentication that I encourage you to use it.
But I have a plan to do many server-side stuffs like searching for text or calculating something.
Here you can find more details about Firestore search options. Regarding calculations, you can do pretty much everything you can do in a regular SQL database.
What costs are involved with developing and/or releasing a Google Assistant App?
eg: Can you develop an app using DialogFlow and a backend (say Firebase) without having to pay while you learn?
First of all - you don't need to use Dialogflow or Firebase to develop your action. Both are suggested, but neither are required. You can use any NLP you want, or none at all if you use the Actions SDK (but you want an NLP). You can use any backend at all, including running it off your local machine and tunneling to it via ngrok, but you don't want to do that for production.
But, during development (and even during a light deployment before your action becomes massively popular and a stand-out hit), you have lots of solutions that will be free.
Dialogflow is free for use with the Google Assistant. Period. There is an Enterprise edition which offers additional services and support for a cost, but you won't need them. There are restrictions, but you won't bump into them until you hit 3 requests per second - which you shouldn't during development.
Firebase's free tier (the Spark Plan) is good for very simple experimentation, but once you start doing network calls to outside Google's network (if you are trying to call the network API for other services), you will be blocked. No worries! The "Blaze Plan" paid tier does require a way to bill you, but they don't start billing you until you get quite a bit of usage: 2 million function calls / month and similarly scaled usage of CPU, memory, and network. So even the "Blaze Plan" will be free during development (and for basic usage).
Updated, December 2020
Things have changed a bit since the original answer was posted, but the underlying basics remain true - there is no charge to develop for Actions on Google.
Dialogflow now has an "Essentials" edition and a more advanced "CX" edition. While you can still use both to build Actions, they're not really intended for this purpose anymore.
Instead, Google has included the Actions Builder into the Actions Console to handle the NLP work. The Actions SDK works with this, but can also just pass along all the STT information to your webhook. Both are also free to use.
Dialogflow is for free if you don't use it as an enterprise:
https://dialogflow.com/pricing/
And Firebase free tier should be enough if you not using firebase
already for other projects. enter link description here
But of course you have to calculate your own time so in case of the
spent time probably not.
For everything else yes it is, as long as you not using it already somewhere. You can for development also host your server local and use an ngrok tunnel as sever address for Dialogflow.
As an addition to shortQuestion's answer:
The free plan in Firebase should be enough if you're just using it for learning and developing apps for personal use. If you want to go a bit further you'll need to upgrade the plan.
You can sign up with a free trial for actions on Google to get 300$ of credits during a 12 month period which would be more than enough to do anything you want.
The costs of Firebase/Actions on Google on a higher plan aren't anything to worry about though, you'd be talking about a few cent per multiple hundred thousand requests.
I'm thinking of using an MBaaS such as Firebase or Kinvey for my next app, and am wondering if any exist which encrypt application data end-to-end (i.e. such that the encryption keys are never shared with the service provider). This seems feasible in theory, since the server is not expected to do any computation on the data, only store it and deliver it to clients.
Does such a service exist? I've found ZeroDB and Crypton, but neither are available as services AFAICT, which means I'd have to administer, scale, and back them up myself. I also thought of using something like Firebase and encrypting my app's data before I pass it to the Firebase API, but I'm wary of writing a one-off crypto layer like that unless I have to (i.e. I'd rather use something that's been peer-reviewed).
Alternatively, if no such service currently exists, why not? Is it technically infeasible, or is there just no market for it?
Edit: This seems closest to what I'm looking for, but considering the broken links on their website I'm guessing it's defunct: Adreneline Mobility
The answer to your question is actually available on the market. CloudMine offers end-to-end encryption (disclosure - I work at CloudMine). They have a largely healthcare focused offering so it has to stand up to HIPAA and other government regs around data security.
Here's a good overview video on security featuring CloudMine's CTO. The first 45 sec. provide some more information on our encryption techniques.
I know I'm being the "sales guy" right now but I'm happy to hop on a call to share what we've built and discuss your specific use case. You can email me at nick at cloudmineinc.com if you're interested.
Virgil Security (full disclosure - I work there) has an end-to-end encryption SDK that works for any endpoint, and also has a special integration with Firebase. It's open source, of course. Check it out and feel free to ask any questions of the team here or on Slack - https://e3kit.readme.io/
I have been given access to a real time data feed which provides location information, and I would like to build a website around this, but I am a little unsure on what architecture to use to achieve my needs.
Unfortunately the feed I have access to will only allow a single connection per IP address, therefore building a website that talks directly to the feed is out - as each user would generate a new request, which would be rejected. It would also be desirable to perform some pre-processing on the data, so I guess I will need some kind of back end which retrieves the data, processes it, then makes it available to a website.
From a front end connection perspective, web services sounds like it may work, but would this also create multiple connections to the feed for each user? I would also like the back end connection to be persistent, so that data is retrieved and processed even when the site is not being visited, I believe IIS will recycle web services and websites when they are idle?
I would like to keep the design fairly flexible - in future I will be adding some mobile clients, so the API needs to support remote connections.
The simple solution would have been to log all the processed data to a database, which could then be picked up by the website, but this loses the real-time aspect of the data. Ideally I would be looking to push the data to the website every time the data changes or now data is received.
What is the best way of achieving this, and what technologies are there out there that may assist here? Comet architecture sounds close to what I need, but that would require building a back end that can handle multiple web based queries at once, which seems like quite a task.
Ideally I would be looking for a C# / ASP.NET based solution with Javascript client side, although I guess this question is more based on architecture and concepts than technological implementations of these.
Thanks in advance for all advice!
Realtime Data Consumer
The simplest solution would seem to be having one component that is dedicated to reading the realtime feed. It could then publish the received data on to a queue (or multiple queues) for consumption by other components within your architecture.
This component (A) would be a standalone process, maybe a service.
Queue consumers
The queue(s) can be read by:
a component (B) dedicated to persisting data for future retrieval or querying. If the amount of data is large you could add more components that read from the persistence queue.
a component (C) that publishes the data directly to any connected subscribers. It could also do some processing, but if you are looking at doing large amounts of processing you may need multiple components that perform this task.
Realtime web technology components (D)
If you are using a .NET stack then it seems like SignalR is getting the most traction. You could also look at XSockets (there are more options in my realtime web tech guide. Just search for '.NET'.
You'll want to use signalR to manage subscriptions and then to publish messages to registered client (PubSub - this SO post seems relevant, maybe you can ask for a bit more info).
You could also look at offloading the PubSub component to a hosted service such as Pusher, who I work for. This will handle managing subscriptions and component C would just need to publish data to an appropriate channel. There are other options all listed in the realtime web tech guide.
All these components come with a JavaScript library.
Summary
Components:
A - .NET service - that publishes info to queue(s)
Queues - MSMQ, NServiceBus etc.
B - Could also be a simple .NET service that reads a queue.
C - this really depends on D since some realtime web technologies will be able to directly integrate. But it could also just be a simple .NET service that reads a queue.
D - Realtime web technology that offers a simple way of routing information to subscribers (PubSub).
If you provide any more info I'll update my answer.
A good solution to this would be something like http://rubyeventmachine.com/ or http://nodejs.org/ . It's not asp.net, but it can easily solve the issue of distributing real time data to other users. Since user connections, subscriptions and broadcasting to channels are built in to each, that will make coding the rest super simple. Your clients would just connect over standard tcp.
If you needed clients to poll for updates then you would need a que system to store info for the next request. That could be a simple array, or a more complicated que system depending on your requirements and number of users.
There may be solutions for .net that I am not aware of that do the same thing, but those are the 2 I know of.
I've looked all over and found nothing about this topic - For people making mobile app games and want to sell levels or potions or whatnot from within the app, is this supported on Flex mobile apps? Are there plans to introduce it? I've found info about advertisement implementation... is this a possible next step? Do you have to use something like PayPal instead of Android Market?
Sorry if this has been asked, but I haven't found anything yet.
Thanks!
I know Adobe said at GDC Conference they are in the process of analyzing requirements to make in-app purchases available via Flash Player API. It's almost a year so far since that announcement but there has not been any further news. The work around/the way most client-server implement these business rule is on the server-side where they implement an entitlements model.
Yes, there are several native extensions that implement this functionality.
I have been using the ones from Milkman Games with good results, and the support is fantastic. No financial association, just a very satisfied user.
There is also a free iOS Storekit ANE as well, although in my experience with it there are still some bugs, notably with blank receipt values for restored transactions: http://code.google.com/p/in-app-purchase-air-ios/
Note: implementing your own entitlements is ill-advised for various reasons:
Apple doesn't allow using anything other than their own in-app
purchase API on iOS.
The various store implementations (well, Apple's
and Amazon's at least, Google Play is another story) handle all of
the details of international purchases and localized pricing for
you.
The store implementations handle payments, subscriptions, durable purchases, and a host
of other details that you will spend a lot of time getting right on your own.