I’m not owning any Alphabet stock, thus I’m not gonna try to sell their product here.
Firebase, is a BaaS and this plugin is mainly focused on Firestore the NoSQL Database.
But, try to write an application in pure anvil that is:
live synced
Is so fast that you are spinner free
scales to a hundred million requests per day with ease
Automatic Sharding
works offline/online with automatic syncing
stores images on a global CDN
Working across plattforms
(what if you build a native Android app in addition to your anvil app? Rest Endpoints & custom JWT Auth )
Saying that as a true anvil-believer, at least for now this can hardly be achieved in pure anvil.
Of course those requirements do not apply for most personal cases, but for someone building a scalable SaaS buisness this should be on your mind when choosing your database.
Check out https://fireship.io , he pretty much does “insert framework/stack here” + FireBase tutorials.
I don’t have any need for it now, but if I wanted to scale the lazy way I would probably use it
He also has a pretty killer YouTube channel called Fireship , if your into that kind of thing. (short videos on modern app development)
We just shipped the stable version 0.4 which includes more powerfull serialization (mostly datetime objects), stablity improvements and the ability to call cloud functions.
Thank you Mark. I’m still looking for a project that needs this for production …perhaps I’ll just choose to use it for some in house production solutions next… I’ll let you know as soon as it gets put to the test.
Rigthfully so!
However - we invested quite some time into this dependency and V0.4 is stable and we are using this library now ourselfs for one of our production apps.
So we won’t introduce any breaking changes for this dependency.
I replaced all the database functionality in a little app used to sign up students for recital performances at Rockfactory, with this dependency. It’s a very low bandwidth app, but serves as a legit proof of concept. Thanks for a great and easy to use integration - the live automatic syncing is really cool!
Automatic syncing of data entered while offline is also a seriously useful feature that comes for free, and saves an enormous amount of potential work where that’s a requirement. I expect to use this integration for lots of projects in the future!
Wow, I missed this when you first announced it, but now I’m excited! This gives me hope that I could stay with Anvil and retain performance if usage of my app scales like I hope it will over the next year or two.
Have you considered open-sourcing it, like on GitHub? That would definitely give me greater comfort as far as using it in production.
@hugetim
I think the dependency will most likely end up beeing open sourced.
So far it just wasn’t worth the hassle to properly open source it - to be honest.
But if more people start using/show interest in it, we will dedicate some time to open source it on github.
Also, some docs feedback: the “Getting started with Firebase for the web - Firebase Fundamentals” video didn’t tell me how to create a Firebase project as I was expecting it to (though that turned out to be pretty self-explanatory). Instead, the contents were pretty redundant to your docs, with the one exception being the reassurance that it really is safe to expose that project_config info on the client side.
thanks for the feedback!
I cleand up the docs and added a note that security is indeed all enforced via security rules. (They act similar to row level security on postgres)
@mark.breuss Do you also have a custom wrapper for the server-side python sdk (reading between the lines from an old post of yours)? I would be interested in that, also, for one. I’ll share my own server-side “hello world” in a separate thread.
I have some helper functions that enable authenticating to firebase with anvil users and so on but nothing major. Maybe the basic functions could be included in the anvil-firebase dependency for ease of use.
Mark, I’ve noticed now that including your firebase third-party dependency in my app slows down server calls by around 3 seconds (without persistent server enabled). I’m guessing this is because the dependency is importing some things in a server module (perhaps firebase_admin) even though the server is not needed for the documented features of the dependency, as far as I understand. If I’m right about this, could you actually remove the server module from the dependency?
)
