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

Setting up the environment


First, we need to create a folder structuresimilar to our Hello World app, which we made in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Firebase and React. The following screenshot describes the folder structure:

When we start making an application with ReactJS, we need to do some setup, which just involves an HTML page and the reactjs library. Once we have finished creating the folder structure, we need to install both our frameworks: ReactJS and Firebase. It's as simple as including JavaScript and CSS files in your page. We can do this via a Content Delivery Network (CDN), such as Google or Microsoft, but we will fetch the files manually in our application so that we don't have to be dependent on the internet and can work offline.

Installing React

First, we have to go to https://reactjs.org/ and see the latest available version that we will use in our application:

As of writing this book, the latest version available is v16.0.0. We will use CDN React packages in this chapter...