TogetherJS + Firebase

by jamest • 13 years ago

41 13 13 years ago

616c• 13 years ago

I keep saying it, and downvote me if you wish. Screw Firebase, and long live any initiative from Mozilla. I am not going to shove my data, realtime or not, through some commercial service I have no intention of paying for and exposing myself to the same non-sense as before.

However, I will give Mozilla a hard time this time around: the README on Github kind of dismisses my desire to host my own TogetherJS/TowTruck server. I am sad only because with other projects, like Firefox Sync and to some extent Persona once the code is stableish, they encourage people hosting their own server-side components.

In any event, no Firebase for me. Thanks.

jamest2• 13 years ago

You definitely don't have the use Firebase. Mozilla even has their own Hub Sever you can use, or you can host your own.

Firebase makes your life easier. It's up to you if you choose to use it.

agibsonccc• 13 years ago

You're highly entitled to your opinion. However, you can't blame them for wanting to jump on the latest bandwagon and promoting their service. It's obviously working for them. And you have to think that services like this do have an audience.

I prefer to roll my own backend too. I still like seeing a startup being inventive with their marketing. Unlike most startups I've seen, they're at least willing to put more effort in to promoting their service beyond a simple top 10 list or one off tutorial.

icedog2• 13 years ago

Agreed. With all the cloud hosting platforms like Heroku, running one's own backend on these services is quite simple and low maintenance. Firebase may be useful for quickly prototyping something at a hackathon, but that's where I'd leave it.

ianstormtaylor• 13 years ago

Source? If that's the case, do you have alternate explanations for the success of Heroku, Firebase, etc?

simonwex2• 13 years ago

[TogetherJS Team Member Here] Our hope is for people to find easy, early success with TogetherJS. Hosting a service is still a relatively difficult thing to do, full of potential pitfalls and costs including SSL certs, etc. We want to steer first-time implementors down the simplest path. That being said, we're happy--no, ecstatic--for those who feel the need to host the hub themselves to do so.

Long term, we'd actually like to do away with the Hub server altogether, and rely instead on the WebRTC DataChannel API. Decentralizing this communication would bring countless benefits to the project, including lower hosting costs and much better end-user privacy implications.

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

Might I recommend http://tent.io as an alternative? I don't have any affiliation with the project. I just think it's the brightest option I've seen for the future of the consumer cloud. It's basically a cloud backend protocol that allows the customer to pick their own tent host that acts as a data store for content they create at sites that use it for a backend. They can even host their own tent. The point is that it gives the user power over where their content is actually stored, with the benefit of centralizing content from disparate apps.

anant• 13 years ago

I wrote this integration with Firebase - kudos to the TogetherJS team - the source code was remarkably easy to understand and very modular! I just had to create a new messaging channel implementation - it already supports WebSockets and postMessage (the latter seems to be unused?).

Adding a Firebase backend to this was as easy as implementing a few methods, took less than 50 lines of code: https://github.com/firebase/togetherjs/blob/develop/together...

simonwex2• 13 years ago

Cool hack, Anant!

KaoruAoiShiho• 13 years ago

I would like Firebase a lot more if they didn't:

1. Raise prices twice in 3 months.

2. Crash all the damn time.

3. Do maintenance at peak times.

4. Have buggy integration software.

As it is Firebase is pretty bad.

jamest2• 13 years ago

[Firebase CoFounder] I'm sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. Regarding 2 & 3 - you're likely seeing interruptions due to new code deploys. We try to balance moving fast and deploying at off-peak times. Rolling deploys are coming soon and will fix this.

Regarding 1 - We only started charging a month ago.

I'm sorry you've had a bad experience with our integration software (I'm assuming you're referring to our Angular binding?) Angular is changing frequently, we work closely with the team at Google and try to keep up as fast as we can.

Keyframe• 13 years ago

First time I see togetherJS, seems a bit on the sluggish side, great premise though.

TogetherJS + Firebase

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