Google Firestore is a document-oriented database that has some neat features for building modern apps as part of the Firebase offering. In most respects, I find it is conceptually similar to AWS Amplify on the surface. Having now worked with both, they feel very different in practice. By Charles Chen.
If you haven’t worked with Google Firebase before, it’s a suite of PaaS tools glued together under one branding and includes:
- An identity management service similar to AWS Cognito or Azure AD B2C
- A document database similar to AWS DocumentDB or Azure CosmosDB
- A real-time sync to the database similar to what’s possible with AWS AppSync and DynamoDB (except without the GraphQL)
- Integration with the Google Cloud Functions runtime
- Integration with Google Cloud Storage
The article then guides you through:
- Workspace setup
- Backend API in C#
- Front-end in Vue + TypeScript
- Adding authentication
- Back-end validation
- Real-time subscriptions
There’s a ton of old documentation and examples on the web with very few real examples of working with the emulator from end-to-end with a front-end and back-end API. This article provides you missing bits, it is well explained with all code provided, contains links to other resources and compares competitor resources to Firebase. Very exciting!
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