We can write web applications by using the frameworks of our choice—be it server-side MVC frameworks, client-side MVC frameworks, or some combination of these. We can also use a persistence store (a database) of our choice—be it an RDBMS or a more modern NoSQL store. However, making our applications real time (meaning, if you are viewing a page and data related to that page gets updated, then the page should be updated or at least you should get a notification to refresh the page) is not a trivial task and we have to start thinking about push notifications and what not. This does not happen with Firebase.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
A brief description about various types of persistence mechanisms
A brief comparison of local versus hosted databases
What Firebase is, why to use it, and different use cases where Firebase can be useful
How to use Firebase
How to structure data while using Firebase
Why denormalizing data can be good sometimes
What is AngularFire...