
How Google Will Use Firebase to Supercharge Its Cloud Computing - ghosh
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/why-google-acquired-firebase/
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julianpye
In most Hackathons I have encountered, client/server interactions have become
increasingly essential to woo a jury. The best way to quickly get a result
over a weekend is to use Parse or Firebase. And hobbyists with some base
knowledge can use it to build prototypes quickly.

Want to achieve the same result with Cloud Endpoints and an Android Client?
You will need a couple of hours just to get the dev environment and skeleton
code up and working to get started. Google has so many clever engineers, but
the barrier of entry to their solutions isn't as low. I think this is where
the Firebase acquisition comes into play. It's a much lower barrier to entry
to use the Google Cloud environment and is probably mostly a play against
Facebook's acquisition of Parse than against Amazon.

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TheAceOfHearts
I feel like Firebase has a great hackathon demo, but still find it hard to
believe that people might actually be using this for their actual backend. The
lock-in is extremely high, and migrating to something else would be extremely
challenging.

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nbardy
As someone who is currently building out some products with Firebase I don't
think the cost to swap platform would be too high as long as you isolating
your data layer properly.

I'm writing it with om/clojurescript; however, the same would be true for
reactjs or any declarative setup. The only code I would need to rewrite would
be the read and write hookups to the server.

~~~
lygaret
And, you know, the real-time data backend itself.

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tristanz
Somebody really needs to write an open source Firebase clone. There's a gaping
void in the market for something that doesn't lock users in and supports on-
premise installs. This could be a pure open source project or open source
business like MongoDB.

It doesn't need to be exactly Firebase. But Firebase sets a high bar. To my
knowledge, there is no production-grade datastore that supports realtime sync,
range queries, and eventual consistency in the face of intermittent
connections.

Email tristan@sense.io if interested trial customer / sponsor.

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taion
It's not a data store, but doesn't Meteor's functionality set get you pretty
close to the same thing? You can essentially build the same type of behaviors
on top of Meteor as you can with Firebase.

