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August 23, 2019


5 REASONS WHY DEVELOPERS ARE CHOOSING 8BASE OVER FIREBASE

8base
@8base


SOME BACKGROUND

There are a ton of essential pieces that go into building production-ready and
scalable apps - for both web and mobile. That said, so many of these pieces are
non-unique back-end systems that every app requires. Developers often get caught
up "re-inventing the wheel" in this regard and are sidetracked from focusing on
the parts that make their projects unique.


Imagine it like this: you're a developer building some epic product that lets
users upload images. Do you want to engineer and maintain a full object storage
service? No! (hopefully) What you want is a service - like S3 - for storage
while you build your app.


Dozens of technology companies have come out with products to fill this exact
need; the need for software/systems provided as services. Between AWS, Google
Cloud Platform, Azure, Bluemix, and many others, 1000's of critical systems for
well-defined requirements are available to developers. 


That said, building apps that utilize many services is a puzzle more than a map.


That is why companies like 8base and Firebase are becoming wildly successful. By
assembling some very, very important and standard pieces of the puzzle, we save
developers 100s of development and maintenance hours from going into systems
that every application only needs to work. And again, we deliver that beautiful
little bundle as a service/system for developers to build amazing things using.



COMPARING APPLES TO APPLESAUCE

8base and Firebase perform many of the same functions. Better said, they
primarily address the same need, though come at it with two very different
approaches. Since the proof is in the pudding, let's dig into the platforms
shared capabilities and how each achieves them.


A BACK-END FOR SAAS APPS

Firebase is a well-known backend-as-a-service. It has a ton of useful features
that can all be tuned and tweaked to power the back-end of a SaaS application.
That said, they've made a much larger effort to be the cloud back-end for mobile
apps. As a developer building SaaS, you can configure Firebase services to suit
your requirements, but it's always going to be extra work.


With 8base, that's pretty different. 8base designed its platform to best
accommodate SaaS apps from day one; with a GraphQL API for any web-client, or
mobile, to consume. This naturally makes it ideal for developers looking for a
backend-as-a-service on any SaaS project. Why? Because things like
authorization, multi-tenancy, user administration, and a relational schema
builder are all native to the platform.


USING SQL VS. NOSQL

NoSQL databases are viral these days. Why? Working with them is speedy and fun.
That said, their reputation struggles to support complexity in terms of data
structures and relationships. Meaning that, for sophisticated business software,
choosing NoSQL is risky business.


Relational databases, on the other hand, handle complexity beautifully and
provide a ton of other benefits. While relational databases need some management
to scale effectively, they are the #1 choice for SaaS apps, providing a
much-needed level of security, reliability, and predictability.


Firebase works with NoSQL and 8base works with a MySQL relational database. Any
developer that knows the facts is welcome to pick their poison. 


THE API: GRAPHQL OR RESTFUL?

Today, almost all apps are data-driven. Making sure a developer has access to
the data they need when they need it, and as they need it, is super important.
For the past decade, REST has been the API standard. While the world has
benefited hugely from REST, it has some limitations. Lets name some:


 1. REST is rigid, requiring different endpoints for different responses.
 2. Teams with back-end and front-end devs need to coordinate any change,
    increasing the complexity of the development effort
 3. Endpoints have a predefined response - often returning more data than needed
    and consuming precious bandwidth.
    

GraphQL, on the other hand, comes with some huge advantages when compared to
REST.


 1. A single endpoint can support any query or mutation (a.k.a. update).
 2. Queries get defined on the client-side, meaning no more endpoint updates
    done by backend developers.
 3. Queries only return data that the developer wants.
    

8base focuses on reducing the complexity and management of things that
developers need to work. One of those things is a CRUD (Create, Read, Update,
Delete) API that securely exposes their data from the cloud. It so happens that,
in 2019, GraphQL is the better and more convenient option for doing just that.
That's why 8base natively built into the platform a GraphQL engine that mirrors
a project's data model. So managing data via the API works as seamlessly as
possible.


Out of the box, Firebase lets users build REST endpoints. You can set up a
GraphQL engine on Firebase, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of know-how.


ROLE-BASED SECURITY

Meanwhile, as everyone is out there building the sleekest and most
straightforward user interface that enchants the pants off users, app security
is too often being overlooked. That's why Firebase and 8base have security built
directly into their products. 


Firebase offers the ability to set up role-based security using custom functions
that get stored as rules. Every rule is then run - or not - against API
requests. The developer can define all their custom authentication logic.


8base built role-based security directly into its platform, and expose that to
developers through a configurable interface. It makes adding permissions and
roles for specific actions on specific tables and fields super straight forward.
It also supports role-based scoping of records using custom filters.


Pretty much, if developers follow either platform's documentation around how to
set up authorization, they won't have to worry about security. It's just up to
them how long they want to take to get there.


AWS OR GOOGLE CLOUD?

Google owns Firebase. Thus, it's no surprise that the product runs on the Google
Cloud Platform (GCP). Google does not own 8base. Therefore, it's no surprise
that the product runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the market leader
in the cloud industry today by a significant margin


A lot of people prefer AWS over GCP. AWS has more availability zones, more
mature services, provides virtual hosting to many of the world's most complex IT
environments, and offers the most competitive pricing. For developers that
prefer AWS, 8base is the way to go. For developers that prefer GCP, you do you!



CONCLUSION

There are millions of developers in the world, each with their nuanced
preferences to specific stacks and tools. In the greater software ecosystem,
1000s of tools and services exist to help support developers in building amazing
apps. Of all the tools, services, frameworks, platforms, and specifications,
only a few stand out.


8base is quickly making a name for itself from a straightforward value prop.


> 8base gives developers a back-end they need when building modern apps, the way
> that they would have wanted to build it themselves.

By configuring dozens of clutch back-end resources and offering them as a
production-ready platform, more thought and creativity can be poured into
developing client-side - or extending the 8base back-end only with
project-specific business logic. Knowing the whole time that security,
scalability, database management, and the like are future proof.


A developer is going to come across both 8base and Firebase when researching
backend-as-a-service platforms. Both platforms are going to offer them similar
features that are backed by different implementations. That said, the experience
that the developer has when using either platform is the real acid test. Based
on the feedback 8base has been receiving, developers of all levels say 8base is
an absolute joy to build with - especially when compared with alternatives.


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