Firebase 2016 Wishlist

[Gary Chamberlain]

Having developed applications using both Parse and Firebase, I find that I like Firebase more. In my opinion, the pricing model is better, and the real-time aspect is superb. However, it lacks a lot of important features that I am hoping will be added soon.

I understand that all of these features can be incorporated using a separate server, but that circumvents the benefits of BAAS, and undermines use of Firebase’s simple-to-use auth infrastructure. To make Firebase the best BAAS application platform, some gaps need to be filled in.

Here’s my prioritized wish list of features that I would love to see added in 2016.

Dynamic Uploads

Many types of applications need support for uploading documents, such as media files or text files.  I know file data can be encoded and stored in the Firebase itself but that is expensive, in performance and money, and is really just a hack to get around lack of real support.

I’d like to see integrated blob storage where file data can be uploaded from the client using common MIME types.  The directory structure would match the hierarchy in the firebase and use the same security mechanisms.  The files could be read back using client-side JavaScript, but also with regular HTTP requests (e.g. image files) perhaps through a CDN.

Alternatively, Firebase could have support for third-party storage such as S3.  However, it would be better to have an integrated solution with integrated pricing.

Payments Support

It should be easy to accept both one-time and recurring payments.  I’d love to see integration with popular payment providers such as Stripe.  The developer would configure how the payment results are written into the firebase.  Alternatively, raw results could be written to a secure-by-default area of the firebase and a background job (see below) would read it and implement application logic.

Yes, middleman services like Zapier or Cloudpipes can be used for this, but it would be so much cleaner to have native support.

No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA

Firebase makes anonymous authentication easy.  However, in many scenarios, it is useless without protection from bots. (thanks spammers!)  Google already has a great solution for this.  Google owns Firebase.  Google meet Google.

Push Notifications

An ability to communicate with clients using standard messaging and email infrastructure is critical for many types of applications.  See Parse.com.  They excel at it.  With Firebase, it would be nice to have the ability to schedule communications, asynchronously, perhaps by writing the requests a particular way into the Firebase and then listen for progress and results also written into the Firebase.

Background Jobs

While a goal of BAAS is to eliminate the custom back end, sometimes you need to execute some business logic.  Perhaps you need a job to clean ephemeral data, or you need to listen for and handle a third-party service.  This is another thing that Parse does well that really needs to be added to Firebase.

I would love support for Node based jobs that can be scheduled or run forever (using something like forever.js).  BAAS developers don’t want to have to think about provisioning servers or anything like that.  Just upload the script, configure how and when it runs, and monitor logs when needed.  …with integrated pricing.

LinkedIn Auth

The intrinsic auth functionality that comes with Firebase is very slick, and it comes with built-in support for auth providers like Google, Twitter and Facebook. I’d love to have LinkedIn built-in, too.

Here’s hoping…

Happy New Year!!

Gary

[Tom Larkworthy]

Awesome list! Thanks for sharing it. Happy new year!

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[Kato Richardson]

Indeed; great list. We've got quite a year in store. Keep an eye out for big announcements!

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[Doug Thompson]

Love this list!

++Dynamic uploads

+ Payment support and push notices via

++++++ Triggers!

[James Tamplin]

Thanks Gary, thanks Doug.

Does anyone else want to +1 these feature requests or add in other ones for 2016? (If you're adding something new, please include a description, like Gary's)

As Kato alludes to, you should all keep your eyes out for big announcements this year.

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[Chris Beckett]

Great list. Files and Node workers/triggers are definitely my two biggies. It would be nice to have a trigger for the user/password system so you can do custom validation and customize or add claims to the auth token. Right now I have to run my own server to do custom auth.

[an...@bidwrangler.com]

How about global data centers?  We use Firebase for a service that needs realtime communication that we'd like to offer globally.  As I understand it, your database and auth clusters are only in Texas.

[David]

I know it's already been mentioned on this forum many, many times, but... full offline support for the JavaScript SDK would be great to have in 2016 :).

[Doug Thompson]

Part of my list has long been awaiting Triggers - it will open up and solve a ton of use cases and features.

++ Dashboard Analytics 

One other thing I'd like to add is improved dashboard analytics. The data on the current analytics page is fine as a way to monitor overall use...but it feels like it's primarily geared to determining whether you're over/under your cap. I'm not entirely sure what would make it better, but I've had a few situations where I wished that we could get reporting on number of requests on a more granular level.

• I outlined a use case previously where using Google Wallet or Apple Passbook there's no client-side way to 'embed' code for tracking the number of opens. The only way to do so would be to count the number of times the database is pinged.
• Separately, we've put in 'counters' in the client to keep track of the number of times Firebase requests are made. This lets us debug and test and make sure we're not creating unintended loops (we discovered one instance where we were unintentionally pinging Firebase 100 times per minute because of the way a geofence was being managed!)

I'm not sure how difficult this would be, but being able to track the number of requests, ideally to specific nodes, would be useful. Possibly other data such as # of users by authentication type would be useful as well.

I'm sure others might have ideas on an improved analytics tab.

++ Documentation

Not a wish really - just a plea to continue....the documentation FB provides including blog posts, examples and API documentation is really incredible. Please keep it up.

Overall, the direction you guys have talked about sure sound like it's take FB in the right direction! 

[Chaz Estell]

My biggest request is multi-location onDisconnect support. Without this, I have to choose between not having onDisconnects at all, or not using good rules that enforce data integrity across multiple locations. Both are poor choices, and there is no possible workaround without official support of this feature.

Dashboard support for determining who is using the database, from where, how many reads/writes they have done, etc. would be very useful as well, though obviously quite an extensive task.

[Rob Koberg]

You could use something like:

http://newrelic.com/browser-monitoring

and we don't bother firebase with extra processing.

[Jethro Bodine]

Same +1s as Doug!

[David East]

Thanks for the insight Doug!

Any blog post topics you'd like to see?

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 8:45 AM Jethro Bodine <jeff.m....@gmail.com> wrote:

Same +1s as Doug!

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[Douglas Correa]

+1

And plus:

- Multiple Login Providers for the same identify it will be a great plus too.

- Angular2Fire

- Out of the box integrations with: Sendgrid, Mandrill, Slack,etc

- Git to deploy

- Prerender support

- More integration with Google Platform

    - easy way to use Google Cloud Storage

    - Integrate with Search API to avoid using an elasticsearch instance or Algolia.

Douglas Correa

m...@dougcorrea.com

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[Enlai Chu]

Great list Gary!

+1 on LinkedIn Auth

[ry...@ryandeussing.com]

+Vuefire (first-class Vue.js integration)

Vue.js is rapidly gaining popularity as a sane alternative to Angular or React. Here's an overview: http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction

Moreover, Vue is also the Javascript front-end of record for Laravel developers, many of whom will be developing a newfound affection for Firebase once Triggers is rolled out.

++Prerender support

It's really, really important that links display properly when shared. 

++Dynamic uploads

+++Triggers for payments/background jobs/emails

Thanks!

[kofifus]

User email verification please !

[Piotr Kaminski]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 11:31 AM, <ry...@ryandeussing.com> wrote:

+Vuefire (first-class Vue.js integration)

Vue.js is rapidly gaining popularity as a sane alternative to Angular or React. Here's an overview: http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction

Moreover, Vue is also the Javascript front-end of record for Laravel developers, many of whom will be developing a newfound affection for Firebase once Triggers is rolled out.

Aurelia is another new framework that might be worth building a first-class integration for.  But I think chasing the latest framework is a losing game for the Firebase team: instead, please document the wire protocol and let the community develop their own!  Or at least expose something closer to the raw event stream in the generic SDK, since single-level-listeners make it difficult to develop efficient first-class integrations.

    -- P.

 

--

  Piotr Kaminski <pi...@ideanest.com>

  "That bun is dirty.  Don't eat that bun."

[Ryan Deussing]

It would be great to have documentation making it easier to write your
own library integration. But I think there's a business case for
creating official integrations for libraries with enough momentum
behind them.

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[Rob Koberg]

+1 I would also like to see email verifications, as well as any other spam user prevention. 

I would also like to be able to add certain fields to the authentication response. One would be a user slug. For example, for my user in a /users path, "Rob Koberg" fullName property gets turned into a slug property with a value like "rob-koberg" or that with some random appended. I would like to be able to configure: "mirror the user's slug in the authentication response obj". Another would be useful for email verifications: Add a blocked property set to true on user create and false when the email address has been verified.

+1 to working on docs and best practices/tips/tricks, not spending time on integrating with angular, react, etc. I use react in a way that is not compatible with ReactFire, so it is pretty much useless to me (and probably anybody else using redux). The JS landscape is moving way too fast. I wonder how many people use react or angular with firebase, but don't use the corresponding ReactFire or AngularFire.

[James Tamplin]

Thanks everyone, it's great to have you chime in so we can prioritize features!

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[Baran Baygan]

+1 I would like to have mobile clients for Firebase dashboard. Web based dashboard is great. However we need to have a client for iOS and Android natively written and available in app stores. We could login with our google account and see all our firebase db's. View and update firebase with it.

[Mike Mcdonald]

Chaz,

You should be able to do this using current multi-location updates:

ref.onDisconnect().update({'path/to/one': value, 'path/to/two': value});

Note that it's all relative to the current ref, so you can't go "above" a ref--but if you care about global onDisconnect actions, you can simply set a rootRef.onDisconnect().update(/* update all paths relevant to the now disconnected user */);

Thanks,

--Mike

[Stefano]

I prefer Firebase too, because of their contact with the developers. I'm not using it right now, because Parse is a better solution for what I need, but I really appreciate that the Firebase team participates in this Google Group actively (which doesn't happen in the Parse group).

[Ajay Gupta]

indeed a great list, may support for .net too

[Rob Koberg]

Thought of a few more:

* the ability to configure a property (client app version number) through the FB admin interface that is returned with all responses, maybe as a header? The use case is when that number changes , you prompt the user to update, or, for web, just refresh the page if it is harmless enough.

* convenience methods for numeric fields (for example a "likes" counter or calculating a the tax on a purchase without relying on a client request)

ref.plus(1)
ref.minus(3)
or
ref.plus(-3)
ref.plus(1).minus(3)

perhaps eventually any math op could be done?

* convenience method for moving data. For example, there are upcoming conferences and previous conferences (archive).

ref.moveTo(relative/Path || /root/Relative/Path)

* ability to set some kind of simple/basic job processing through the FB admin interface. For example, every night I want to check if a conference should be archived. I have some UI ideas if interested.

[Alexander Ivanov ✔]

Push Notifications & Background Jobs are good to continue. Thank you for the announcement.

[Andrew Lee]

I just wanted to say a real quick *thank you* to everyone here! These feature requests are super helpful, and you all continue to be awesome : ) 

We working to grant some of these wishes. Stay tuned...

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 10:52 PM, Alexander Ivanov ✔ <oshli...@gmail.com> wrote:

Push Notifications & Background Jobs are good to continue. Thank you for the announcement.

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[Gary Chamberlain]

Thanks for all the great responses!!  I'm still hoping for the wishes in my initial post, but here are a few more for good measure.

Others have mentioned pre-render support.  I'm particularly excited about Angular Universal and would love, love, love to use that with Firebase, using Firebase auth.

+++ Angular Universal

Integration with Azure AD to more easily integrate firebase apps with corporate enterprises would be da shiznit, even if it was a paid add-on.  Perhaps that would be integrated on the back end (e.g. node)

+++ Enterprise auth

Smaller Identifiers.  I understand how the identifiers are generated to be unique.  However, they are very long.  Due to the denormalized way data should be stored, the same long ids are written over and over and over again.  Couldn't the ids just be auto-incremented numbers and save a ton of space?  Have the firebase back end determine and hand them out to ensure they are unique (per firebase instance)

+++ Smaller IDs

Login de-duping.  I'm not sure how to best do this, and maybe all we need is just a good blog article with recommended practice.   I'd like the same person to use the same account, whether they login with Google, Twitter, or their other Google account.

+ Login de-duping

Better dashboard. I agree with Doug Thompson.  I'd love to more detail.  Perhaps have some configurable charts with a simple reporting language, aggregations et al.

+ Improved Analytics

[Jason Barone]

+1 for executing code. The Firebase Triggers demo was exciting, but it's been a lifetime since anything has come out of that.

[David Garza]

I would like a way to clear the offline persistent cache manually, specifically for iOS.

[kofifus]

Also I would love to see this forum move out of google groups to a platform where it is possible to edit the posts etc (ie, http://www.discourse.org/)

[ry...@ryandeussing.com]

+1000

On Jan 26, 2016, at 7:11 PM, kofifus <mika...@gmail.com> wrote:

Also I would love to see this forum move out of google groups to a platform where it is possible to edit the posts etc (ie, http://www.discourse.org/)

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[kofifus]

Also would be great if the off() command would return the ref so that it can be chained

 ie ref.off('value').on('value', ...

Thx!

[Gary Chamberlain]

It’s hard to believe that it has been almost 3 years since I wrote this wishlist.

I just posted a Firebase 2019 Wishlist. Love to hear your comments and let me know what I'm missing.