On Monday we had our first Firebase Drink Up. We've been knee-deep in code since our beta launch in April and we hadn't seen many of our users in-person for a long time.
We decided to fix that.
WeWork labs kindly let us use their space on 2nd Street in SOMA, just a few blocks from our office. It's a gorgeous venue with hardwood floors, pool, foosball and a great vibe. Around 200 Firebase users, friends and startup folks came.
It was also a great chance to meet Rob and Greg, the newest additions to the team!
Vikrum, in-between serving drinks and (new!) Firebase t-shirts, took some great pictures:
Ankur, Janine, and Song from TokBox getting their name-tag on.
Anmol and Jeff chat as people start to trickle in.
Things started to get going; Ivan was having a blast!
We projected a Firebase-powered game of Tetris on the wall, along with the Graphical Debugger so you could see the data changing in real-time.
Everyone had a great time and we wouldn't be where we are without the support of our users, friends, and the startup community in SF. A special thanks to Kaitlin, Seth and Dave at WeWork Labs.
Stay tuned for next time!
Today we're pleased to announce that Firebase databases now support SSL. This is the first of many steps we will be taking in the coming months to make Firebase the most secure way to build your cloud application.
This means that both the Firebase JS include and the packets that are transmitted between the Firebase server and your users' browsers will be encrypted.
For developers who are new to Firebase, please see our updated documentation. For developers who have used Firebase previously, you'll need to change two things:
1. Your Firebase JS Include
You should alter the script tag in your page
https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/2.4.2/firebase.js
Concretely this will look like:
<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/2.4.2/firebase.js"></script>
2. Your Firebase URL References
Each piece of data inside Firebase has its own URL -- that is one of our core concepts. To use SSL for sending and receiving data from your clients, these URLs will need to be altered to use 'https', for example:
https://SampleChat.firebaseIO.com/
var myRootRef = new Firebase("https://SampleChat.firebaseIO.com/");
We understand that SSL is just the beginnings of a comprehensive security system. We'll be making many more announcements over the coming months relating to security. Stay tuned!
Yesterday I gave a talk at the O'Reilly Fluent conference in San Francisco outlining some ways of building multiplayer games using a synchronization service as the backend.
The slides are below. The source code for the examples is on GitHub. Enjoy!
Make your-game-multiplayer
View more PowerPoint from Andrew Lee
On Thursday night we had a party to celebrate our launch! We had 250 people stop by and we were thrilled to have 9 great presentations of apps built on Firebase. We had another 10 demos on tables around the space.
Here is the first video of the night explaining "What is Firebase?" Enjoy!
We’re super excited to introduce Firebase to the world today. Our goal with Firebase is to enable developers to build higher quality apps in a fraction of the time it used to take.
If you haven’t already, please check out our website, especially our fully interactive coding tutorial to see what Firebase is and what it can do for you! And if you’re in San Francisco, we’re hosting a huge launch party tonight at 7PM where we’ll have free food / beer and amazing demos.
What makes us so excited about Firebase is the untapped developer potential we see all around us. Firebase actually grew out of Envolve, our existing chat service for websites. We discovered that our most exciting customers wanted to do more with real-time data than just send chat messages. They wanted to build real-time games, collaboration tools, analytics products, and much more, but it was just too hard with the existing technology.
With Firebase, we aim to solve that and much more. Firebase provides a JavaScript API and cloud service that gives you a real-time, scalable backend that you can access directly from your web application. When you use Firebase as your data store, you don’t need to run your own servers, and your app gets data updates in real-time, meaning your user never has to refresh the page to get new data. This shift lets you build better apps with less work. Firebase can be used to build fully interactive websites, games, collaboration tools, and much more. For more details on Firebase and our core tenets, see here.
Over the past few months we’ve been giving Firebase to developers to see how they use it and what they’re able to build, and we’ve been incredibly impressed and inspired by the results. When you lower the technology barrier for building real-time interactive apps, developers truly shine and build amazing things! We’ll be showcasing many of their apps here in our blog over the coming weeks.
We’d love for you to join us in our journey. Please try out our interactive tutorial, sign up for the beta, and follow us on our blog and twitter!
