When I found Firebase it as love at first sight. You can easily get an application up and running with little to no backend development. But, just like any language, technology, or framework, there are going to be some drawbacks to using it.

One of the biggest issues with Firebase is that their SDKs force you to do a lot of the backend logic client-side. This can cause performance issues and lead to some undesirable code.

Another issue has to do with data security. When you fetch a node from their Realtime Database or Firestore, you have to return all the data. Coming from C# I was used to using data transfer objects (DTOs) to minimize data sent to the front-end.

Luckily we have Firebase Cloud Functions that allow us to easily connect to the database. And, if you’re familiar with Express, you’ll feel right at home.

In this Firebase Cloud Functions tutorial, we’ll look at how to create a REST API to mitigate some of the issues touched on above.

#nodejs #firebase #javascript #programming