The application my group is developing for my capstone project is an emergency response app that will be used to report and track emergency data for the fire departments in the Dominican Republic. The current version of this application will be developed for Android devices therefore our group is utilizing Android Studio using the Jetpack Compose toolkit for developing the UI. We have also decided to host the backend for our application using Google Cloud technologies. To develop the backend, our group has decided to use Google’s Firebase framework. This has been my favorite technology I have used in our project so far.
Firebase is a cloud-based platform that provides a wide range of tools and services to streamline the development and management of web and mobile applications. Firebase is known for its real-time database, easy-to-use authentication, cloud function hosting, and application hosting, making it an all-in-one solution for developers.
So far in the project, I have used Firebase cloud function hosting in order to develop an API that handles the exchange of information from our front-end to the back-end and I have used Firebase’s real-time database for storage of emergency response and responder information. I love the amount of documentation and ease of use of all the technologies in this framework. It took me no time at all to get our API hosted and begin making calls to store our application’s data. Firebase also makes it extremely easy to authenticate and link our backend to our application by automatically generating the required code. When a new project is developed, Firebase asks for the type of project we will be developing such as an iOS app, Android app, or web app. Once we specify that the app will be an Android app, all we have to do is tell Firebase the name of our application, as referenced in our Androud source code, and Firebase generates all the Kotlin code which we can copy and paste into our Android project’s build gradle files, giving our application access to the technologies we implement in Firebase.
One area where I think that Firebase could improve would be to implement a cloud shell that acts as a virtual machine on the cloud servers where we can upload and test files before hosting them. This is a feature that is available in the standard Google Cloud Platform and I have used it multiple times to run and test code for my Cloud Application Development class. Currently, Firebase code is hosted and stored locally. We have to download the Google Firebase toolkit in order to run, test, and deploy our code. We are not limited by this implementation once everything is configured properly but getting everything working correctly can be a bit of a challenge at first. I feel that it would be a simple and convenient option to have a cloud shell available for Firebase projects.
Overall, I believe Google Firebase is an extremely useful platform that simplifies the development of web and mobile applications. It empowers developers to create intricate and scalable applications without worrying about the complexities of backend infrastructure. Whether you’re a new developer making their first app or a large company scaling your technologies, Firebase is a great choice for streamlining the development process.
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