Here is the continued article on my previous post for creating a welcome with login and logout using ReactJS. Today’s post explains how to implement login authentication system for your React JS applications. It will show you how to log in with a user and store the user session, so it deals with token-based authentication. Since we are using token-based authentication, it protects if any unauthorized request is made and notices for a new login if required. This makes your application’s authentication to be more secure compared with any other authentication system. Every user details will be stored in an external database and a PHP based API is used in the backend for handling this authentication. Hope you’ll find it more easily using this as your authentication system in your ReactJS projects. Let’s look into the live demo and follow the below code.
Days back, I have posted an article on how to create a welcome page with proper login and logout using Ionic 3 and Angular 4. Today’s article is to create the same welcome page with ReactJS and ES 6. The article is about how to login/signup to get inside the application home page, you can navigate to different pages and finally you end up with a logout action. Lets see how to set a starting page with navigations using ReactJS and ES 6.
Video Tutorial: ReactJS Welcome Page with Routing Tutorial
It's October and Halloween is around the corner! I'm sure many of you have scary costumes to put together. When you're not spending time planning your costume masterpiece, check out some of the new features available in Firebase Test Lab for Android:
Robo test improvements
Test Lab's automated Robo testleveled up recently! Robo now crawls your app with about double the previous coverage. That means it will reach more screens and take more actions, which boosts its ability to find crashes throughout your app. In fact, the rate of finding crashes has gone up by about 62%. Robo is very motivated to find those scary bugs before they frighten your users away! If you haven't run a Robo test against your app, just upload your APK to Test Lab in the Firebase console at no cost. You also get a Robo test with your pre-launch report in the Play Console. For the crafty among you, you could possibly make your own Robo.
Faster test results
If you run a lot of tests with the gcloud command line, and primarily want to know if your tests simply pass or fail, you can speed up your tests by opting out of some of the extra information that Test Lab collects for you. Passing the --no-record-video flag will opt out of the collection of the video of your app, and --no-performance-metrics will opt out of performance data collected for game loop tests. So use these options to give your tests a good cardio workout for sustained high speed, which is imperative for escaping zombies.
Support for Android Test Orchestrator
The Android Testing Support Library recently published some enhancements to the tooling used to test Android apps. With these updates, you can now make use of Android Test Orchestrator, which helps you isolate your Android test cases and therefore promote more consistent test results. Test Lab now supports this handy utility, so consider making use of it in your test suites today. Here's a gratuitous link to an orchestra in costume.
If you want to chat with the Test Lab team and others in the community who love testing their apps, why don't you join the Firebase Slack and find us in the #test-lab channel? There's no tricks there, only treats.
Hey, did you hear the big news? We just announced the beta release of Cloud Firestore -- the new database that lets you easily store and sync app data to the cloud, even in realtime!
Now if you're experiencing some deja vu, you're not alone. We realize this sounds awfully similar to another product you might already be using -- the Firebase Realtime Database. So if you're experiencing some deja vu, you're not alone.
So why did we build another database? And when would you choose one over another? Well, let's talk about what's new and different with Cloud Firestore, and why you might want to use it for your next app.
What's different with Cloud Firestore?
While our documentation covers all of the differences between the Realtime Database and Cloud Firestore in much more detail, let's look at the main differences between the two products. And we'll start with...
Better querying and more structured data
While the Firebase Realtime Database is basically a giant JSON tree where anything goes and lawlessness rules the land1, Cloud Firestore is more structured. Cloud Firestore is a document-model database, which means that all of your data is stored in objects called documents that consist of key-value pairs -- and these values can contain any number of things, from strings to floats to binary data to JSON-y looking objects the team likes to call maps. These documents, in turn, are grouped into collections.
Your Cloud Firestore database will probably consist of a few collections that contain documents that point to subcollections. These subcollections will contain documents that point to other subcollections, and so on.
This new structure gives you several important advantages in being able to query your data.
For starters, all queries are shallow, meaning that you can simply fetch a document without having to fetch all of the data contained in any of the linked subcollections. This means you can store your data hierarchically in a way that makes sense logically without worrying about downloading tons of unnecessary data.
In this example, the document at the top can be fetched without grabbing any of the documents in the subcollections below
Second, Cloud Firestore has more powerful querying capabilities than the Realtime Database. In the Realtime Database, trying to create a query across multiple fields was a lot of work and usually involved denormalizing your data.
For example, imagine you had a list of cities, and you wanted to find a list of all cities in California with a population greater than 500k.
Cities, stored in the Realtime Database
In the Realtime Database, you'd need to conduct this search by creating an explicit "states plus population" field and then running a query sorted on that field.
Creating a combined state_and_population field, just for queries
With Cloud Firestore, this work is no longer necessary. In some cases, Cloud Firestore can automatically search across multiple fields. In other cases, like our cities example, Cloud Firestore will guide you towards automatically building an index required to make these kinds of queries possible…
...and then you can simply search across multiple fields.
Cloud Firestore will automatically maintain this index for you throughout the lifetime of your app. No combo fields required!
Designed to Scale
While the Realtime Database does scale to meet the needs of most apps, things can start to get difficult when your app becomes really popular, or your dataset gets truly massive.
Cloud Firestore, on the other hand, is built on top of the same Google Cloud infrastructure that powers some pretty popular apps. So it will be able to scale much more easily and to a much greater capacity than the Realtime Database can.
And with the new querying structure, all Cloud Firestore queries scale to the size of your result set -- not the size of your data. This means that a search for the top 10 restaurants in Chicago for a restaurant review app will take the same amount of time whether your database has 300 restaurants, 300 thousand or 30 million. As one engineer here likes to put it, "It's basically impossible to create a slow query in Cloud Firestore."
At the start of our beta period, Cloud Firestore will already allow scaling to levels somewhat greater than that of the Realtime Database, although we are putting a few restrictions around things as we monitor how the database performs in more real-world situations. But look for Cloud Firestore to be able to expand automatically to ludicrous levels2 as we get out of the beta period and move closer to a general availability release.
Easier manual fetching of data
While some developers appreciated the real-time nature of the Realtime Database for building features like chat or enabling magical collaborative experiences, we found that many of our developers simply wanted to use the Realtime Database as a traditional, "Just fetch data when I ask for it" kind of service.
Although the Realtime Database does support this with .once calls, they can sometimes feel a bit unnatural to use and often play second-fiddle to the streaming methods within the SDKs. With Cloud Firestore, making simple one-time fetch queries is much more natural and is built as a primary use case within the Firestore API.
Of course, you can still add support for listeners, so that your clients have the ability to receive updates whenever you data changes in the database. But now you have the flexibility to retrieve your data however you'd like.
Multi-Region support for better reliability
Cloud Firestore is a multi-region database. This means that your data is automatically copied to multiple geographically separate regions at once. So if some unforeseen disaster were to render a data center -- or even an entire region -- offline, you can rest assured that your data is safe.
And for you database aficionados out there, we should point out that our multi-region database offers strong consistency (just like Cloud Spanner!), which means that you get the benefits of multi-region support, while also knowing that you'll be getting the latest version of your data whenever you perform a read.
Different pricing model
The two databases have fairly different pricing models: The Realtime Database primarily determines cost based on the amount of data that's downloaded, as well as the amount of data you have stored on the database.
While Cloud Firestore does charge for these things as well, they are significantly lower than what you would see in the Realtime Database3. Instead, Cloud Firestore's pricing is primarily driven by the number of reads or writes that you perform.
What this means is that if you have a more traditional mobile app where your client is occasionally requesting larger chunks of data from your database -- think something like a news app, a dating app, or a turn-based multiplayer game, for instance -- you will find that Cloud Firestore's pricing model might be more favorable than if you ran the same app on the Realtime Database.
On the other hand, if you have an app that's making very large numbers of reads and writes per second per client (for instance, a group whiteboarding app, where you might be broadcasting everybody's drawing updates to everybody else several times a second), Cloud Firestore will probably be more expensive.4 At least for that portion of your app -- you can always use both databases together, and that's fine, too.
Of course these are just rough guidelines, make sure you check out the Pricing section of our documentation for all the details on Cloud Firestore pricing.
Why you still might want to use the Realtime Database
With this list of changes, you might come away with the impression that Cloud Firestore is simply better than the Realtime Database. And while Cloud Firestore does have a fair number of improvements over the Realtime Database, there are still situations where you might want to consider using the Realtime Database for some of your data. Specifically…
The Realtime Database will probably have slightly better latency. Usually not by much -- maybe a couple hundred milliseconds from the database to the client -- but if you're looking for a database with reliably low-latency updates to power an app that feels instant, you might prefer the Realtime Database.
The Realtime Database has native support for presence -- that is, being able to tell when a user has come online or gone offline. While we do have a solution for Cloud Firestore, it's not quite as elegant.
As we noted above, Cloud Firestore's pricing model means that applications that perform very large numbers of small reads and writes per second per client could be significantly more expensive than a similarly performing app in the Realtime Database.
Cloud Firestore is still a beta product. The Realtime Database has been available for four years and has been battle-tested by hundreds of thousands of production-level apps. Cloud Firestore has seen limited production usage over the last few months by several dozen apps. And while some of these apps -- like HomeAwayand Hawkin Dynamics -- are already out in the real world and performing quite nicely, there will likely be issues or edge cases with Cloud Firestore that we simply haven't discovered yet.
The tl;dr: Just tell me what to use!
In general, we recommend that most new applications start with Cloud Firestore, unless you think that your app has unique needs, like those we outlined above, that make it more suitable for the Realtime Database.
On the other hand, if you have an existing database that's already running just fine on the Realtime Database, go ahead and keep it there! If you find you're running up against issues where Cloud Firestore could really help you out, then you could consider switching, or moving part of your data to Cloud Firestore and using both databases together. But don't switch just for the sake of switching.
And if you're looking for a magic, "Please convert my database from the Realtime Database to Cloud Firestore" button, there isn't one5! And, frankly, we don't know if there ever will be. Given how different the database, querying, and pricing structures are between the two, blindly converting a database that's been optimized for the Realtime Database over to Cloud Firestore wouldn't necessarily be a great experience. We want you to be more thoughtful about making this kind of change.
There's a lot we think you'll be able to do with Cloud Firestore and we're excited to see what kinds of apps you're able to build with it. As always, if you have questions, you can hit us up on any of our support channels, or post questions on Stack Overflow with the google-cloud-firestoreand firebase tags. Good luck, and have fun!
Today we're excited to launch Cloud Firestore, a fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development. It's designed to easily store and sync app data at global scale, and it's now available in beta.
Key features of Cloud Firestore include:
Documents and collections with powerful querying
iOS, Android, and Web SDKs with offline data access
Real-time data synchronization
Automatic, multi-region data replication with strong consistency
Node, Python, Go, and Java server SDKs
And of course, we've aimed for the simplicity and ease-of-use that is always top priority for Firebase, while still making sure that Cloud Firestore can scale to power even the largest apps.
Optimized for app development
Managing app data is still hard; you have to scale servers, handle intermittent connectivity, and deliver data with low latency.
We've optimized Cloud Firestore for app development, so you can focus on delivering value to your users and shipping better apps, faster. Cloud Firestore:
Synchronizes data between devices in real-time. Our Android, iOS, and Javascript SDKs sync your app data almost instantly. This makes it incredibly easy to build reactive apps, automatically sync data across devices, and build powerful collaborative features -- and if you don't need real-time sync, one-time reads are a first-class feature.
Uses collections and documents to structure and query data. This data model is familiar and intuitive for many developers. It also allows for expressive queries. Queries scale with the size of your result set, not the size of your data set, so you'll get the same performance fetching 1 result from a set of 100, or 100,000,000.
Enables offline data access via a powerful, on-device database. This local database means your app will function smoothly, even when your users lose connectivity. This offline mode is available on Web, iOS and Android.
Enables serverless development. Cloud Firestore's client-side SDKs take care of the complex authentication and networking code you'd normally need to write yourself. Then, on the backend, we provide a powerful set of security rules so you can control access to your data. Security rules let you control which users can access which documents, and let you apply complex validation logic to your data as well. Combined, these features allow your mobile app to connect directly to your database.
Integrates with the rest of the Firebase platform. You can easily configure Cloud Functions to run custom code whenever data is written, and our SDKs automatically integrate with Firebase Authentication, to help you get started quickly.
Putting the 'Cloud' in Cloud Firestore
As you may have guessed from the name, Cloud Firestore was built in close collaboration with the Google Cloud Platform team.
This means it's a fully managed product, built from the ground up to automatically scale. Cloud Firestore is a multi-region replicated database that ensures once data is committed, it's durable even in the face of unexpected disasters. Not only that, but despite being a distributed database, it's also strongly consistent, removing tricky edge cases to make building apps easier regardless of scale.
It also means that delivering a great server-side experience for backend developers is a top priority. We're launching SDKs for Java, Go, Python, and Node.js today, with more languages coming in the future.
Another database?
Over the last 3 years Firebase has grown to become Google's app development platform; it now has 16 products to build and grow your app. If you've used Firebase before, you know we already offer a database, the Firebase Realtime Database, which helps with some of the challenges listed above.
The Firebase Realtime Database, with its client SDKs and real-time capabilities, is all about making app development faster and easier. Since its launch, it has been adopted by hundred of thousands of developers, and as its adoption grew, so did usage patterns. Developers began using the Realtime Database for more complex data and to build bigger apps, pushing the limits of the JSON data model and the performance of the database at scale. Cloud Firestore is inspired by what developers love most about the Firebase Realtime Database while also addressing its key limitations like data structuring, querying, and scaling.
So, if you're a Firebase Realtime Database user today, we think you'll love Cloud Firestore. However, this does not mean that Cloud Firestore is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase Realtime Database. For some use cases, it may make sense to use the Realtime Database to optimize for cost and latency, and it's also easy to use both databases together. You can read a more in-depth comparison between the two databases here.
We're continuing development on both databases and they'll both be available in our console and documentation.
Get started!
Cloud Firestore enters public beta starting today. If you're comfortable using a beta product you should give it a spin on your next project! Here are some of the companies and startups who are already building with Cloud Firestore:
