Firebase and Server-side Swift

[miamiHeat4life]

Hi,

My team is developing an application that will require a decent amount of server side processing, hence, we will need to develop an App Server to connect to Firebase.

Ideally, we would like to do this in Swift and therefore evaluating Vapor and Perfect. However, so far it appears there are compatibility issues (e.g. no Firebase support of OSX). Thus, it appears my only option right now is using the REST api ) to connect (e.g. curl , http) with Firebase from Vapor / Perfect server. I hesitate to use this since its my understanding that if we do this, we loose all the real-time / offline features that Firebase SDKs provide and thus less appealing to use Firebase. 

Is this correct assumption? Are there any alternatives (besides coding the server in java / javascript / etc)? 

Thanks

[Jacob Wenger]

Hey there,

You are correct that your only option to use Firebase in server-side Swift is to use the REST API. Some people on our team are kicking around the idea of an Swift SDK which works on the server-side, but currently there are no concrete plans to create that. The REST API definitely requires more effort than our client libraries (handling retries, latency compensation, etc.), but you can still get realtime streaming through the REST streaming API.

Cheers,
Jacob

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[miamiHeat4life]

Thanks for the reply Jacob. 

Server-side swift would be great!

[Andrea Ferrando]

Thanks Jacob for the useful answer.
Just a quick question: I couldn't find in the documentation if it is possible to observe events (like you can easily do in iOS with fir_reference.observe() ) with REST API.
Like miamiHeat4life, we are building our API with Vapor but we would like to integrate them with Firebase. No problem regarding normal REST requests, but what we would like to achieve is firebase sending "notification" to the server when something changed on a firebase database observed "table".

Is it possible?

Thanks

Regards

Andrea

On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 7:57:50 PM UTC, Jacob Wenger wrote:

Hey there,

You are correct that your only option to use Firebase in server-side Swift is to use the REST API. Some people on our team are kicking around the idea of an Swift SDK which works on the server-side, but currently there are no concrete plans to create that. The REST API definitely requires more effort than our client libraries (handling retries, latency compensation, etc.), but you can still get realtime streaming through the REST streaming API.

Cheers,
Jacob

On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 10:59 AM, miamiHeat4life <ezeq...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

My team is developing an application that will require a decent amount of server side processing, hence, we will need to develop an App Server to connect to Firebase.

Ideally, we would like to do this in Swift and therefore evaluating Vapor and Perfect. However, so far it appears there are compatibility issues (e.g. no Firebase support of OSX). Thus, it appears my only option right now is using the REST api ) to connect (e.g. curl , http) with Firebase from Vapor / Perfect server. I hesitate to use this since its my understanding that if we do this, we loose all the real-time / offline features that Firebase SDKs provide and thus less appealing to use Firebase. 

Is this correct assumption? Are there any alternatives (besides coding the server in java / javascript / etc)? 

Thanks

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[Jacob Wenger]

Hey Andrea,

Firebase REST endpoints support the EventSource / Server-Sent Events protocol, meaning you can in fact observe events instead of just poll for them. It is not as fully featured as the client SDKs' websocket-backed APIs, but it might suit your needs. See the Streaming from the REST API section for the full details.

Cheers,

Jacob

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[bogdan barbulescu]

Hi, you might want to see the issues I encountered when trying to write to two different nodes using Firebase Transactions using the IOS SDK, and then I decided to use the REST API https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45508007