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Let's build an open-source Firebase with Couchbase

17 points by whatts ↗ HN
Firebase is an awesome service. But if you want to build your products around Firebase and their API, you need reliability and guaranteed support for the future.

As with any commercial provider, you don't have any guarantee here. This may be even more so now that Google has acquired Firebase.

Maybe you build an awesome app with Firebase, and in 12 months, Google decides that it just wanted the technology and the team, and shuts down Firebase as an independent service. What will you do?

As far as I can see, the Couchbase project offers similar features and all pieces of the stack are open-source.

How does this help? We can just re-use Couchbase Server and Couchbase SyncGateway. And on top of Couchbase Mobile and their other client libraries (iOS, Android, .NET), one can build a "shim" that maps Firebase's API to the Couchbase API.

The result will be a drop-in replacement for Firebase that is 100% open-source.

Maybe it will be most efficient to continue using Firebase even then. But it's always good to have a safe replacement up your sleeve.

7 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] thread
whatts
Maybe Meteor would work as well. But they don't have any client libraries ready, in contrast to Couchbase.
bgar
I think http://hood.ie/ is promising.
whatts
Well, it is. Just like Meteor. There are dozens of possibilities how you could do it nowadays. You can even use your own Node.js server with WebSockets, use CouchDB, etc.

But nothing comes close to the first experience and ease of development you have with Firebase. And I'd love to build my products around Firebase and embrace their service if there was not that risk of them shutting down some day.

An API that works as a drop-in replacement would let us developers sleep much better, wouldn't it?

So I'd like to know: Which open-source product would you consider best as the foundation for something like that?

Couchbase? hood.ie? Meteor? CouchDB?

I'd love to work on such an open-source "clone", and maybe we'll even find some more collaborators.

bgar
CouchDB could be the starting point that we can build on top of.
whatts
Can you explain why you would suggest CouchDB? Of course, it seems to be a great project. Nevertheless, it has no built-in support for publishing and subscribing, and real-time notifications.

We would have to built this ourselves. However, CouchDB has a "_changes" API that can even be turned into "continuous" mode [1]. This is the perfect data source for pub/sub.

hood.ie, Meteor, etc. offer more features, but they are also more cluttered and not as clean as CouchDB.

[1] http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/api/database/changes.html

bgar
Well I mean if you just want to use replace Firebase you might as well use hood.ie directly, unless you want to build it yourself (in which case using just the database and layering functionality on top of that might be best). Hood.ie can be an out-of-the-box replacement for most of Firebase's functionality as it is.