Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets | Hacker News Reader

Poor Man's Firebase: LevelDB, REST, and WebSockets

procbits.com

89 pointsjonpaul24 comments

Would love if someone produced a decent open source firebase-clone with turn-key angularfire integration. I really want to use it, but some of my clients are not OK with having data stored on someone else's server(rationally or not)

You might like https://www.meteor.com/

> (As an aside, it seems that it would work most of the time in most of environments that I'd try, but for some reason, it rarely worked in one). So I needed to find a new solution.

'Instead of debugging the one environment, I'll just reimplement the entire service!'

Obviously. :-)

It seems to be a personal project. Since there aren't any meaningful consequences for writing a bug-ridden, unsupported app, it's way more valuable to reinvent the wheel than to become an expert in someone else's work.

I know, I'm not saying he's a bad person, I'm just poking a little fun at the mentality that leads to wheel-reinvention as the first and only conclusion.

I still think it's a cool project.

I'm not sure if this is wheel reinvention, so much as wheel subset reimplementation. The latter of which is a very legitimate practice, quite frankly.

You're right. I forgot to put my pedantry hat on before typing that comment.

Well, it might also have something to do with money or control, as Firebase is SaaS, and this solution is open source software.

https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html

As an aside, what happens with FireBase when you need more than 30GB of storage in a single app?

You switch to the Inferno plan (scroll down! :P) and then on to Enterprise plans (or just pay overages, though I'm not sure if they apply to disk?)

Ah, thanks. The fold looked like a complete page to me!

Regardless, I still find the potential lock-in costs and issues incurred with a proprietary datastore like FireBase to be a total and complete deal breaker.

For truly production-grade systems, relinquishing control over your data stores does not seem like a viable path to better reliability or control for any business with significantly large swaths of data.

If there were a compatible open-source equivalent with easy import functionality for a FireBase dump, I'd be singing a different tune.

Am I missing or overlooking something here? I get the use case for a small project or app, but for mission-critical production, it doesn't seem like a good idea.

I built an npm module with a very similar goal - an open source alternative to FireBase. It's open source at https://npmjs.org/package/waferdb

This is quite nice.

Before we (https://www.tesla.im) switched to Firebase we had (still have) our own realtime system built with NodeJS, Websockets, Amazon SQS (as backup to ensure messages don't get lost) and a RIAK cluster.

Just to clarify things a bit; our setup worked fine. The only reason we switched to Firebase was, being a small team, we didnt want to maintain all those servers.

Sounds cool, have you thought about open sourcing what you have buid?

Yes we can open source it. It works pretty well. You will have to maintain these 'minimum' servers to get > 99% availability.

2 NodeJS app servers 1 Redis Master + 1 Slave 3 RIAK cluster (recommended 5)

You might want to checkout https://www.meteor.com/ as well.

I don't want to sound negative towards you project, but why not use CouchDB [0], along with TouchDB [1] for mobiles and PouchDB [2] for the browser ?

[0] https://couchdb.apache.org/

[1] http://touchdb.org/

[2] http://pouchdb.com/

There is no project... just experimentation with LevelDB. All of those solutions that you provided require an installation of CouchDB on the server side. Therefore, a bit out of scope of building a quick hacky Firebase clone using LevelDB modules.

Actually, that's not true: PouchDB runs on node (via LevelDB) and doesn't need an actual couch server. :)

I'm not sure about that. The doc [0] says that there are some static files that should be distributed by whatever HTTP server you want (they suggest python's simple http server) After that, it's all js in the browser.

Edit: I see what you mean: Pouchdb-server [1] is a couchdb-compatible server that speaks the same sync protocol. If you don't want to install it, you can work with any hosted couchdb-speaking cloud instance, such as iriscouch [2] or cloudant [3]

[0] http://pouchdb.com/getting-started.html

[1] https://github.com/nick-thompson/pouchdb-server

[2] http://www.iriscouch.com/

[3] https://cloudant.com/

Pretty cool project! I remember the pleasure I got out of (partially) re-implementing the Pusher API.

I wonder why real-time features aren't more popular? Real-time order status, live-updating maps, the list goes on!

I think they're not that popular because the potential revenue lift for implementing the features you listed does not seem significant.

Absolutely true! The geek in me sees a sort of halo effect of having those king of features, though, in how much I appreciate a project; I'm sure that's not as easily quantifiable.

i always thought that firebase should be easy to replicate with some node + express REST + websockets + client code if you plan on doing a bigger longterm project with sensitive data. For smaller projects (experiments, campaign related stuff) firebase should be fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com