Book Image

Serverless Web Applications with React and Firebase

By : Harmeet Singh, Mayur Tanna
Book Image

Serverless Web Applications with React and Firebase

By: Harmeet Singh, Mayur Tanna

Overview of this book

ReactJS is a wonderful framework for UI development. Firebase as a backend with React is a great choice as it is easy, powerful, and provides great developer experience. It removes a lot of boilerplate code from your app and allows you to focus on your app to get it out quickly to users. Firebase with React is also a good choice for Most Viable Product (MVP) development. This book provides more practical insights rather than just theoretical concepts and includes basic to advanced examples – from hello world to a real-time seat booking app and Helpdesk application This book will cover the essentials of Firebase and React.js and will take you on a fast-paced journey through building real-time applications with Firebase features such as Cloud Storage, Cloud Function, Hosting and the Realtime Database. We will learn how to secure our application by using Firebase authentication and database security rules. We will leverage the power of Redux to organize data in the front-end, since Redux attempts to make state mutations predictable by imposing certain restrictions on how and when updates can happen. Towards the end of the book you will have improved your React skills by realizing the potential of Firebase to create real-time serverless web applications.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Firebase and React
Index

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Firebase and React

Realtime web applications are said to include the benefits of superfast responses to the user and are highly interactive, which increases the user engagement flow. In this modern web, there are many frameworks and tools that are available to develop Realtime applications. JavaScript is one of the most popular scripting languages that is used for building applications on the web. This book introduces you to ReactJS and Firebase, which you will likely come across as you learn about modern web app development. They both are used for building fast, scalable, and realtime user interfaces that use data and can change over time without reloading the page.

React is famously known as a View in Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and can be used with other JavaScript libraries or frameworks in MVC. For managing the data flow in React app, we can use Flux or Redux. In this book, we will also go through how we can implement redux with React and firebase app.

Note

Redux is the alternative to Flux. It shares the same key benefits. Redux works especially well with React, for managing the state of the UI. If you have ever worked with flux, then it's easy too.

Before jumping into the code, let's refresh our knowledge of ReactJS and see what we can do with Firebase and their features, to know the power of firebase.

Here is the list of topics that we'll cover in this section:

  • Introduction of React
  • React Component LifeCycle

This will give you a better understanding of dealing with React Components.