October 2014 Summaries

Firebase announced that it has joined Google after growing from an experimental idea into a product used by 110,000 developers in three years. The company said Google’s engineering resources, infrastructure, and cloud expertise would help Firebase scale more rapidly, while the two organizations’ complementary goals would create a more complete platform for mobile and web application development. Existing Firebase users were assured that the service, developer experience, platform-agnostic approach, and support for iOS, Android, and web clients would continue unchanged. Firebase also thanked its developer community for feedback, open-source contributions, and adoption, invited people to learn more at Google Cloud Platform Live on November 4 in San Francisco or via livestream, and noted that it was hiring.

Firebase highlighted student projects from the MHacks and CalHacks hackathons, where participants used its real-time data storage and synchronization tools to create web, mobile, and hardware-based applications. At MHacks in Ann Arbor, more than 1,100 hackers attended and 34 teams used Firebase, with prizes awarded to VoteApp, a free real-time classroom polling platform, and City Paint, a virtual graffiti wall that accepts texted ASCII art. At CalHacks, attended by more than 1,000 hackers, Firebase’s winning projects focused on connected hardware: Nextile Shurt used sensors attached to a shirt to capture movement data for posture tracking or physical therapy, while Pomsafe combined a door-mounted device with real-time temperature and entry monitoring for home security and automation.

Y Combinator launched an official Hacker News API powered by Firebase, giving developers near-real-time access to the site’s public stories, comments, votes, and other data through Firebase’s Web, iOS, Android, and REST interfaces. Hacker News, which attracts millions of monthly visitors and features user-submitted, community-ranked technology and entrepreneurship content, had previously been commonly scraped by developers seeking access to its rapidly changing data. Firebase positions the integration as a simpler, scalable alternative that provides ready-made client SDKs and allows applications to monitor updates such as the current top story in real time. The announcement also presents Firebase as a platform for organizations to expose public APIs by synchronizing data to Firebase, reducing the infrastructure, scaling, and documentation work traditionally associated with maintaining developer APIs.