May 2014 Summaries

Crowdsound, founded by Cy, is a real-time audience engagement platform for live talks, panels, seminars, news shows, and other events that enables organizers to collect demographic information, receive questions, run polls, and maintain post-event communication among participants. Inspired by the challenge of gathering feedback and encouraging active involvement in both in-person and virtual events, the platform aims to turn passive audiences into contributors regardless of location. Built primarily with Firebase and Angular, Crowdsound uses Firebase’s real-time data capabilities, security rules, and centralized data exchange alongside AngularFire, a custom synchronized array implementation, a Node server on Heroku, and static assets hosted on Amazon S3. Its use cases include classrooms, where professors can anonymously quiz students and identify concepts that need further explanation. Planned features include native video streaming and private rooms, intended to provide a more integrated alternative to fragmented video conferencing and streaming tools.

Firebase announced Firebase Hosting, a production-oriented hosting service for static web apps designed around security, reliability, global scale, and simplified deployment. The service provides CDN-backed delivery, automatic SSL certificates including support for non-SNI devices, custom and naked-domain support, one-command deployments, and one-click rollbacks. The launch reflects the growth of client-side applications built with frameworks such as Angular, Ember, React, and Backbone, which distribute static assets globally while retrieving dynamic and personalized data through APIs such as Firebase. Firebase Hosting aims to remove the need for developers to find separate asset-hosting providers by combining HTTPS by default, globally cached SSD-based content delivery, and integration with existing Firebase plans. Free users receive a firebaseapp.com subdomain with 1 GB of storage and 100 GB of transfer, while paid plans include custom domains, SSL, 10 GB of storage, and 1 TB of transfer with additional usage charges.

Firebase synchronized arrays can combine the client-side sorting, filtering, and manipulation benefits of arrays with Firebase’s real-time collaborative object updates, though existing libraries such as EmberFire, AngularFire, and BackboneFire already provide framework-specific support. The recommended approach treats the synchronized array as read-only, assigns each item its Firebase key as a unique identifier, writes server events directly into the array, and sends local edits to Firebase through wrapper methods so they return through the same event stream. Using JavaScript examples, the post shows how to listen for Firebase child-added, child-removed, child-changed, and child-moved events to insert, delete, update, and reorder array records while preserving server ordering. It then adds convenience methods for creating, removing, updating, and locating records, avoiding direct array mutations that could conflict with concurrent server changes.

ReactJS is presented as a high-performance JavaScript library focused on the view layer of applications, using a virtual DOM, one-way data flow, component props, and state-based rendering to build complex interfaces. Because React alone does not provide persistent data storage, Firebase can supply a realtime backend that preserves application data and synchronizes updates across clients. Using a Todo application example, the post shows how Firebase event listeners can load existing items, react to newly added items, save submissions, and remove listeners when components unmount, allowing data to persist after refreshes and update across multiple browser tabs. It also introduces ReactFireMixin, a tool that reduces integration boilerplate by binding Firebase references directly to React component state as arrays or objects, automatically managing synchronization and cleanup while requiring developers to write changes directly to Firebase.