BUILDING REALTIME MOBILE APPS WITH FIREBASE

Moyinoluwa ADEYEMINovember 28, 2015

Firebase is a powerful platform for building realtime feature-rich apps

Realtime Database

NoSQL JSON data store

Cross-platform client-side SDKs

Restful API

Works Offline

Auto-scaling

Authentication

Anonymous

Email / password

Social

Custom

Hosting

Free static asset hosting

SSL certificate

Global CDN

Single command deploys

One-click rollbacks

Custom domains

So you want to learn how to build a realtime mobile chat application with Firebase?

Sign up on https://www.firebase.com/ to get a firebase (data) url

Add the library dependency directly to your app’s gradle.build file

In cases of build errors caused by duplicate files, exclude those files by adding these too

Connect your app to Firebase

Edit your AndroidManifest.xml file

First, request an INTERNET permission in the <manifest> tag

Next, change the name of the application

Create a Chat Model class

Send a message to FirebaseCreate a new Activity, complete with a layout that looks better than this. Be sure to add a <ListView />, an <EditText /> for collecting messages and a <Button /> for sending the data.

Send a message to Firebase

Create a reference to Firebase in the Activity and insert your own firebase url.

Send a message to Firebase

Retrieve the text from the EditText and push to Firebase

Retrieve a message from Firebase

Create a layout for the chat. It could look like this, or even better

Retrieve a message from Firebase

Create a ChatAdapter class that extends FirebaseListAdapter

Retrieve a message from Firebase

Create a ChatAdapter class that extends FirebaseListAdapter

Retrieve a message from Firebase

Override onStart() in MainActivity to read and display the messages

Retrieve a message from Firebase

Override onStop() in MainActivity to remove all the data

Implement offline functionality with Firebase

With just one line of code… seriously

Woohoo!!!

You now have a very basic Firebase app that sends, receives, displays messages and functions offline.

Credits

The official Firebase Chat App example was modified to produce this app.

The complete app including Login functionality implemented with Firebase is available on Github here:

https://github.com/moyheen/LagosFirebaseCodelab

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Thank You!