Book Image

Mastering Firebase for Android Development

By : Ashok Kumar S
Book Image

Mastering Firebase for Android Development

By: Ashok Kumar S

Overview of this book

Firebase offers a wide spectrum of tools and services to help you develop high-quality apps in a short period of time. It also allows you to build web and mobile apps quickly without managing the infrastructure.Mastering Firebase for Android Development takes you through the complete toolchain of Firebase,including the latest tools announced in Google IO 2018 such as Firebase ML-Kit, FireStore, and Firebase Predictions. The book begins by teaching you to configure your development environment with Firebase and set up a different structure for a Firebase real-time database. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll establish the authentication feature in Android and explore email and phone authentication for managing the on-boarding of users. You’ll be taken through topics on Firebase crash reporting, Firebase functions, Firebase Cloud, Firebase Hosting, and Cloud Messaging for push notifications and explore other key areas in depth. In the concluding chapters, you will learn to use Firebase Test Lab to test your application before using Firebase Performance Monitoring to trace performance setbacks. By the end of the book, you will be well equipped with the Firebase ecosystem, which will help you find solutions to your common application development challenges.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
9
Application Usage Measuring and Notification, Firebase Analytics, and Cloud Messaging
11
Bringing Everyone on the Same Page, Firebase Invites, and Firebase App Indexing
12
Making a Monetary Impact and Firebase AdMob and AdWords
13
Flexible NoSQL and Cloud Firestore
14
Analytics Data, Clairvoyant, Firebase Predictions
Index

Creating storage reference


A storage reference is like a bridge for the cloud bucket and web services to request stored files. It acts as the data communication bridge between the client and Firebase web service. All the files stored in the cloud bucket are accessible through a reference. Remarkably, references are playing a prominent role in the process of file uploads and downloads. Storage references are instances of the StorageReference class from the Firebase storage support library. Developers can get the reference by calling the getReference() method of the FirebaseStorage instance. 

The quintessential process of setting up Cloud Storage is first to create a FirebaseStorage class instance:

FirebaseStorage storage =FirebaseStorage.getInstance();

For setting up reference, all we need to do is use the instance of FirebaseStorage to call the getReference() method:

StorageReference storageRef = storage.getReference();

By default, a newly obtained storage reference instance focuses on the root...