React devs might find this archived course helpful to reference, but this course has been updated! We now recommend you take the Firebase Fundamentals course.
Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Steve Kinney: So let's talk a little bit about Firebase. As I mentioned, this is version two of the course. And in the year and a half since we did this last time, Firebase released an entirely new database. So [LAUGH] a lot has actually changed, and also, React has changed a lot in that time too, right?
[00:00:19] We have a new context API, all sorts of new ways for dealing with state as well. So there's a lot of kind of new and interesting ways in which the two interact. So we'll talk a little bit. We're going to build a application using Firebase and React from the ground up, with a kind of very close to a create React app basis.
[00:00:37] And then start to bring in various different Firebase features. We're going to bring in authentication, right? If you've ever tried to wire up oauth yourself, one, I'm sorry, and two, you're gonna be a little both elated and sad when you see how easy it is with Firebase. We're going to use Firebase's brand new Cloud Firestore, which is their fancy new database that is a lot easier to work with and a lot more scalable.
[00:01:10] And it's really kind of exciting. We'll play around with storage for storing images and any other kind of files that we wanna store. We'll upload those through our React app as well. And then we'll also write cloud functions. There's a lot of stuff, like Firebase, we think about it a lot as, it's totally for a front end to talk to a back end system, right?
[00:01:30] But actually we can write back end code with Firebase too. And we're going to need to for a lot of things. There's a lot of things you don't wanna necessarily do on the client so it's awesome to be able to make API end points. Or say, hey, when this data change, then I want to go ahead and trigger all these other actions, right?
[00:01:44] So you can do a whole bunch of stuff in the background. If you've ever played with AWS Lambdas or anything along those lines, it's very similar to that. Based on events that happen in your application, you can trigger other things that go on and happen as well. Right, so be able to update data, change stuff as other things change, and it'll be really interesting.
[00:02:01] And for me, this is also very compelling, because one of my hobby horses is this argument that we don't tend to think about modern client-side applications in the same way that we think about stuff like an iOS or an Android application. Your modern day true web application is very much like a mobile application.
[00:02:26] Right, it was one of those boiling a frog things where it went from, okay yeah, I'm gonna do some form validation in jquery. To, I'm going to ship a giant of bundle of JavaScript, and an index.html file with a single div on it and build the entire thing in there.
[00:02:41] And have it work offline, and stuff along those lines, right? So it's really interesting to use the same kind of tools, like Firebase, we're gonna use it with React today. But Firebase also supports iOS and Android as well, right? So kind of thinking in that paradigm of building, in our case, both desktop and mobile applications, cuz that's the beauty of the web.
[00:03:01] We can start to think about it in the same way that we think about building native mobile applications, they're using some of the same frameworks. Again, we are doing this in JavaScript and React, but the Firebase concepts, theoretically, should you choose to pick up Swift or Kotlin or Java to do Android development, the concepts still apply, right?
[00:03:23] Theoretically, some of these concepts will still apply to React Native as well.