Firebase is a very popular Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) tool launched in April 2012. Because of its state-of-the-art capabilities and technology such as its real-time database, it caught the interest of Google and was acquired by Google in 2014. I started to explore Firebase technologies before Google's acquisition. Now, Firebase has transformed into a powerful tool, containing support for most of the use cases of real-world software development. Firebase divides the toolchain into three distinct categories: build your application, improve the application's quality, and grow your business.
The book introduces all the tools with quick code snippets, and also, in a couple of chapters you get to run programs as quick simple projects. The book will give you complete comprehension of what Firebase has to offer for Android developers by tailoring features and code snippet examples in every chapter.
Since Firebase, it has become easy to build a great mobile application, be it iOS or Android. Firebase has a lot of things to offer, from analytics to user acquisition and A/B testing, and the list goes on. This book will cover the most up-to-date information on Firebase, including the latest tools that were introduced in Google IO 2018.
The book can be used by any developer who has basic knowledge of building mobile or web applications. Though the book targets Android developers, there are chapters on Firebase functions and hosting that can help web developers too.
Chapter 1, Keep It Real – Firebase Realtime Databaset, will introduce configuring the development environment and deep dive into the popular Firebase feature, the real-time database.
Chapter 2, Safe and Sound – Firebase Authentication, demonstrates how to use the multi-platform sign-in feature available in Firebase. Developers will be able to explore email authentication, social login, phone number authentication, and more.
Chapter 3, Safe and Sound – Firebase Crashlytics, demonstrates the Firebase crash reporting feature in detail, along with how to diagnose and fix bugs, and how to generate detailed error reports
Chapter 4, Genie in the Cloud – Firebase Cloud Functions, contains comprehensive examples and an overview of Firebase functions. Firebase functions is still in beta and the active development phase, but it is already a jaw-dropping technology.
Chapter 5, Arsenal for Your Files – Firebase Cloud Storage, consists of comprehensive examples and an overview of Firebase cloud storage. Firebase cloud storage helps store and serve content with ease. This chapter will show how to store different mime type files ranging from photographs to videos.
Chapter 6, Not Just a Keeper, Firebase Hosting, comprises comprehensive examples and an overview of Firebase Hosting. Firebase Hosting is a very handy feature for hosting websites. Firebase Hosting has low latency and Global CDN with a free SSL certificate.
Chapter 7, Inspection and Evaluation – Firebase Test Lab, contains comprehensive examples and an overview of Firebase Test Lab for Android. This cloud-based infrastructure helps developers to test their products on different use cases. Test Lab can test applications remotely on different devices.
Chapter 8, A Smart Watchdog – Firebase Performance Monitoring, explains the process of diagnosing an application's performance issues. Using the trace feature, we will be able to monitor specific bugs and avoid performance setbacks.
Chapter 9, Application Usage Measuring and Notification, Firebase Analytics, and Cloud Messaging, explains how to measure an application's usage and send and receive push notifications.
Chapter 10, Changing Your App – Firebase Remote Config and Dynamic Links, explains that Firebase Remote Config lets you change the behavior and appearance of your application. Dynamic links are very useful in terms of presenting the content to different platforms.
Chapter 11, Bringing Everyone on the Same Page, Firebase Invites, and Firebase App Indexing, and Firebase App Indexing, explores sending and receiving invites from your mobile app. Also, App index helps get public and personal content from your app into users' search results.
Chapter 12, Making a Monetary Impact and Firebase AdMob and AdWords, helps developers inflate in-app advertisements and improve the user experience. You will access monetization reports using AdWords developer, and will learn how to reach potential customers with online ads.
Chapter 13, Flexible NoSQL and Cloud Firestore, helping developers to write next-generation Firebase applications.
Chapter 14, Analytics Data, Clairvoyant, Firebase Predictions, demonstrates the power of Firebase Predictions, which runs the advanced machine learning algorithms by predicting the next action before it takes place.
Chapter 15, Train Your Code and ML-kit, illustrates the power of ML-kit by explaining its features. You also will write an application to perform text recognition in a photograph captured through your phone's camera.
To master Firebase, you need to have fundamental knowledge of platforms such as iOS, web, and Android. The book mostly targets Android developers, and at the time of writing, the following assumptions were made for the reader:
- How to install the latest version of Android Studio
- Has Google official credentials for Firebase
- An intermediate developer who can understand Java and Kotlin syntax
- Little experience of CLI tools and Node.js syntax
The book also has a little for web developers if you are a beginner and want to explore how to host your website and you want to understand a little bit about writing Node.js code that can trigger an action.
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We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system."
A block of code is set as follows:
FirebaseUser user =FirebaseAuth.getInstance().getCurrentUser(); if(user !=null){ // When User is signed in }else{ // When user is not signed in }
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
myTrace = FirebasePerformance.getInstance().newTrace("packt_trace")
myTrace?.start()
val bundle = Bundle()
bundle.putString("oncreate", "created")
mFirebaseAnalytics?.logEvent(FirebaseAnalytics.Event.SELECT_CONTENT, bundle)
myTrace?.stop()Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
npm install -g firebase-tools
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
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