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Building mobile apps faster with Firebase
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Last week at
Google Cloud Platform Live
, we
demonstrated
how Firebase could be used to build mobile apps quickly and also gave a sneak preview of some new features the team has been hard at work on.
One highlight onstage was showing how you could build a fully functional collaborative office planning application in about
15 minutes
. Building this app so quickly was possible because Firebase provided the common backend infrastructure needed to get up and running, allowing us to focus on the application’s front-end code and user experience.
We’ve been busy
We’re proud of what Firebase already can do to speed up your development time, but we’re working harder than ever to improve the platform. At last week's event, we announced a new Firebase feature called
enhanced query support
. You can now query data by any child key and have that query update in realtime as your data changes. These improvements make it easier for developers to sort and filter their data and will make many common use cases much easier to implement.
Last week, we also
demoed
a new type of integration with server-side code that makes it especially easy to connect Firebase with Google App Engine. This new feature, called Triggers, is simple to implement: in your Firebase’s rules, you define a Trigger specification which includes criteria for when the trigger should fire. When the criteria are met, an outbound HTTP request is sent to an external service you specify along with any data and headers you provide. Use triggers to submit a payment, send an SMS, ping a server for logging and analytics or invoke some code on an external server -- all without needing to write your own server-side code.
We used Triggers to connect the office planning application to an analytics backend running on
App Engine
, and then used
BigQuery
to generate a report about how the furniture moved around the room -- all in just a few minutes with a couple lines of code. Our Triggers feature hasn’t launched yet, so stay tuned for our beta announcement soon.
And are going to get even busier...
We’re continuing to improve Firebase along every dimension, and a big part of that effort will go towards improved integration with the rest of Google Cloud Platform. Although developers building Firebase applications love the simplicity of focusing on client-side development, about half of our developers also run their own server-side code. These developers need to do computationally intensive tasks like video or image processing, perform complex analysis on their data, and keep proprietary business logic on trusted servers. With Firebase joining Google Cloud Platform, developers can power their entire product using a single platform.
This is just the beginning. We’re focused on finding all of the ways Firebase can work seamlessly with other Google Cloud Platform products to bring you the best developer experience possible. To get these updates first, please
follow us on Twitter
.
As always, we look forward to seeing what you build.
-Posted by Andrew Lee, Product Manager
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