So it’s 2014 and the buzzword of the year seems to be Serverless, having computation as a service or the ability to have a stateful application without the need to run and manage a backend server, sounds an interesting idea. Just as the cloud has revolutionised how we deploy and build new systems, will Serverless give us the flexibility to quickly and effortlessly run code without the overhead of a server.

This is a write up of the 7 minute lightning talk on FirebaseAPI & AngularJS, to create a super simple voting app with only a few lines of code and no ops work. A little bit of fun to show the power of Serverless architectures in 7 mins.

The Power of the web

AngularJs is a client side MVC style framework written in Javascript. The framework adapts and extends traditional HTML to better serve dynamic content through two-way data-binding that allows for the automatic synchronisation of models and views. As a result, AngularJS de-emphasises DOM manipulation and improves testability.

Firebase, Don’t just save data. Sync it. When data changes, apps built with Firebase update instantly across every device – web or mobile. Firebase-powered apps work offline. Data is synchronised instantly when your app regains connectivity.

In a traditional AngularJS app you may talk to a RESTful backend, Firebase replaces the need for this backend and instead you simply communicate with Firebase directly. Firebase provides a helpful AngularJs client library to interact with this service.

AngularFire also lets you automatically synchronise any changes to a local JS object to Firebase without having to explicitly call any methods at all. We call this “3-way data binding”. Much like Angular provides 2-way data binding between JS models and the DOM, AngularFire provides a way to automatically keep JS models and Firebase in sync.

The Demo app

Lightning Voting app shows a simple web application published to Github pages and providing a working integration with firebase Api. The source is available here and a quick overview of the code is coming up.

The Code

Add the dependencies for Angular, Firebase and the AngularFire.

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.2.18/angular.min.js"></script>

<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/1.0.15/firebase.js" ></script>

<script src="https://cdn.firebase.com/libs/angularfire/0.7.1/angularfire.min.js" ></script>

Mix in the firebase module into the angular app, angular.module("awesome-voter", ["firebase"]) this allows you to call the firebase service and store data, we use the bind method to give us 3-way binding of the data stored in the votes bucket and angular variable in the view.

The potential for this service is huge and the number of applications covers a huge spectrum, I’m sure firebase will be continue to grow and become a staple in the Serverless ecosystem.

Cheers

Alex.