What is Firebase?

Building a progressive web app is, for the most part, a frontend process. PWAs care little for how they consume data from a backend API (unless it impedes performance, of course). We want to keep the backend setup for our application minimal; for that, we turn to Firebase.

Firebase is a project by Google designed to help developers build apps without worrying about backend infrastructure. It operates on the freemium model, based on the amount of requests your backend has to respond to as well as the amount of storage you need. For our purposes, it is the perfect fit for quickly developing a small prototype. When our app scales, the Chatastrophe executive board assures us, "money won't be an issue."

What does Firebase provide? Of interest to us is a database, a hosting solution, and built-in authentication. Beyond that, it also offers something called Cloud Functions, which are snippets of code automatically run in response to certain events. We'll be working with Cloud Functions once we add push notifications to our application. For now, we want to add some authentication to our login form so that users can sign up and log in to Chatastrophe.

If you have a Google account (via Google Plus or Gmail, for example) you can log in to Firebase with those credentials, or create a new account; that's all we need to get started.