I’m a big fan of Firebase and services alike. I used it at the first hackathon I participated in. They make front-end development so easy and blurs the borders between development and production in such way that you don’t have to worry about it. Focus on the contents of your software!
For people unfamiliar with Firebase or noBackend in general, noBackend is the name for a trend where developers move a lot of their code normally residing on the server side to client-side tasks. It makes servers doing less heavy jobs, “borrows” their users PC to handle most of the tasks, and only do the absolutely necessary on the server (like security and storage)
Past week I have been trying to find open source alternatives on backend-engines just for fun and came across some good solutions like PouchDB, Deployd and Hoodie.
I really liked them, but they all were not 100% production ready, Hoodie doesnt have support for custom security rules, PouchDB (works on top of CouchDB) only allows user-private data with a custom database per user. And Deployd is slowly updated right now.
I was a little irritated at this, because I believe there is a lot more in the market for static web apps than we might think. A LOT more.
Announcing OpenFire
Today I finally finished the OpenFire beta release. It’s done in 3 weekends. It’s far from perfect, still in beta but it’s awesome and I’m very proud of it, so proud I decided to open-source all the code and share the idea around with you guys. The purpose of this post is to gain initial feedback for me to decide how to go on with this project.
To begin, OpenFire doesnt want to be your database:
– It wants to be your backend, so you don’t have to worry about creating and maintaining one.
– It wants to interact with your database of choice, so you don’t have to.
– It wants to synchronize your data real-time across your users
All it takes is 2 commands to install and get started, if you like to check it out already, here is the link to our website: openfi.re
It is database agnostic
What did you say? Yeah! Soon, creating data static web apps will be just like creating data on a typical Django or Ruby on Rails app. You can just pick a database you like to work with and OpenFire will share it’s data with it.
This works by having a built-in abstraction layer, where you can make it work with other databases using plugins.
If you need speed to read/write, hook OpenFire up to Redis.
If you need to store large objects, just plug in MongoDB.
How awesome is that? Currently OpenFire only has a in-memory database that is gone when you close your server, but I will definitely make support for more databases. I first wanted a minimum viable product 😉
Real-time data pushes
The OpenFire SDK has built-in support to connect to the server using WebSockets or Long polling if WebSockets is not supported. Quickly listen to object additions, deletions or changes and receive data in a serial-matter for extreme speed that outperforms HTTP big-time.
Fast to read, fast to write
OpenFire has a number of home-made technologies that makes storage efficient and reading fast. For instance, if you store a big object, and only want to read back a child of that object, it will only load a part of the object in memory.
Contributions
CodeBuffet is a 1-man company, so all contributions, big or small are openly respected and encouraged! I currently haven’t got the time to write good documentation, but I will definitely do that somewhere in the weekend!
Roadmap
The reason for me releasing this project already is to gain initial feedback and to see if more people like the idea.
OpenFire is definitely not production ready yet. It lacks certain features for running a stable server, like wrappers for a proper database like MongoDB or Redis, also there are no security settings yet for you to configure.
I’m planning to use OpenFire long-term for my next projects and can’t wait to see it production ready.
The following features are planned short-term:
– Database support (I start first with MongoDB I think, as it’s the most general-purpose database suitable for this kind of work)
– Offline compatibility in the SDK
– Security (validate data before storing in the database)
Get started
Our website is at: openfi.re
You can play with the example or download it for yourself 😉
How does it work?
Click here for an in-depth overview.
1 reply on “Announcing OpenFire Beta: Revolutionary database & backend-server”
Hello! It seems that I’m the first one to comment : ).
I’m new to university and I’m a greenhand in Computer Science .
I’m very interested in your ‘OpenFire’ project, and I’m eager to learn how it works.
But it seems that understanding the project on my own is beyond my ablity(at least now ),
could I ask you some questions about the project ? Thank you !
1. In your example, you use ”, I’d like to research on the js file,
but it seems that the file isn’t included in your project , could you please tell me how can I find it ?
2. I have installed your code on my server,when I test it , the cartoon fire composed of symbols interested me, : ) (I have never seen before)
could you please tell me how can I play tricks on console and how can I start the code just use a command ‘openfire hack’ ? which part of your code realizes this function? (I know this is a stupid question and you can just tell me where I can find what I need,thanks)
3.The last question——-could you tell me the architecture of your project ? or where should I start to learn?
please help , thank you !!! : )