Great backend service for realtime data.

[Cameron Roe]

https://www.firebase.com/

[Tim Anglade]

Hi there, sharing services you like with the group is a totally appropriate thing to do on app-craft, but maybe a bit more context around links would be helpful? As much as possible, please refrain from sending just bare links around, this is not the kind of conversation we want to have here :)

I’m a big fan of Firebase by the way, and their push-based backend as a service is really cool. You may also be interested in looking at Pusher.com, another startup that is taking a push-centric approach to backends.

Those types of backends are great if you are building chat apps, games that rely on live exchange of information between players or between the server and the player, dashboard that need to be refreshed in real time etc. Basically, any situation where you would find yourself refreshing the information every 10 seconds or less… They are much more efficient at sending you short updated than doing a full fetch back to a static, pull-based backend-as-a-service like Parse, Stackmob or Apigee.

I know some people get confused between push-based backends like Firebase and Pusher and the concept of Push Notifications. The latter usually refers to native push messages sent to iOS or Android devices (which most pull-based backends let you send), i.e. *outside* the app — it’s a system level integration that uses your App ID (and icon). In comparison, the former are push-centric, and include the ability of sending push notifications of sorts *inside* the app, without having to go through a system-level notification, and with more ability for your app to peer into what data was actually sent on the push message.

The downside of push backends is that they are usually less flexible than “pull backends” when it comes to doing queries, storing files, managing social connections and user accounts, etc. Obviously the space is moving really fast, so my prediction is that both sides will get better at what the other does until there is little to no difference between the two strands of backends :)

Thanks again for sharing with the group, and don’t hesitate to be a little more verbose and share what you learned with others next time ;) See you around soon Cameron.

Cheers!
Tim

On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 9:46 PM, Cameron Roe <camer...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.firebase.com/

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[Cameron Roe]

Great point Tim! I'll try to be a little more elaborate when posting to the group! Yes, real-time backends are ideal for chat apps, games, etc.. it's a great resource. Another way to integrate real-time would be to use socket.io within a node server.