Firebase and example usage with Angular

Get to know what the Firebase platform can do for you. Plug in Google authentication, database and backend in minutes.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Did you ever hear about Firebase? If not, or you simply did not have time to take a look at it, you are in the right place.

I will show you how Firebase could drastically reduce your time to market by

talking about its main features

showing how these can be used in a web app

advising about when it makes sense to use it (or not).

This post is also available as a video 👇 that was recorded at the Geekle meetup in Amsterdam (if you prefer to read, just scroll down directly).

Enjoy!

Meetup presentation

The Firebase platform: pick what you need

Firebase is a full-featured platform for web and mobile development. As such, it could drastically reduce the time to market for your app, given that the other way is configuring and building things by yourself from scratch.

It offers plenty of features, ranging from authentication and NoSQL database usage to machine learning and push notifications.

If this sounds overwhelming for you, I have just two words: no panic!

You don’t need to know everything that Firebase can offer and how to use it. One important concept is that you can just pick what you need. Here are some examples:

need an auth system? Use Firebase Authentication

need a database? Use Firestore

need a node backend? Use Cloud Functions

In my opinion, the key advantage of using Firebase is described by this quote:

Build apps fast, without managing infrastructure

If you like it or no, managing infrastructure is always part of building an app or website. With Firebase, you don’t need to care about it so you can focus on building awesome products.

Main features (or basically, what I use more frequently)

Authentication

Authentication plays a key role in every app. Want to add Google, Facebook and Twitter authentication? Doing it by yourself can take a while, also taking into account that a user could register multiple times in different ways (and you probably want to merge those accounts). Using Firebase is just a matter of activating it and doing some basic configuration.