What’s New in Firebase’s Latest Release (Aug’2022)
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Let’s see what is new in firebase Aug’2022 release.
There are mainly 6 topics to cover in the August release.
Firebase launched two related features for Firebase extensions at Google I/O,
1. the extensions emulator and
2. the extensions events
The extensions emulator allows you to run extensions locally without touching your production project, while the extension events allow you to customize the extension's behavior by writing handlers that respond to specific events in that extension.
Firebase will make sure that these two features work in a better way and allow you to respond to events in emulated extensions.
Such events are published to the Eventarc emulator, which is new in the firebase emulator suite. And users can register handlers for them in the cloud functions emulator.
Upgrade to the latest Firebase CLI at Firebase CLI 11.6 → https://goo.gle/3R052KH
3. One of the best features of the Firebase ROTEM database is its own disconnect handlers.
These handlers allow you to curate operations when you are connected to the database backend, and that then gets executed on the server when it detects that a client is no longer connected. This allows many use cases, such as the present system that you can find in Firebase documentation.
But when used with Firebase authentication to require authenticated cleanups, the onDisconnect() handlers could fail on the server when your auth token had expired.
This led to so-called zombie connection notes in the database, especially from inactive browser tabs.
Firebase also upgraded the database backend to run these onDisconnect() handlers just before the associated auth token expires.
4. Earlier this year, Firebase announced that Firebase Hosting now has origin servers on multiple continents, Europe and Asia, plus two more across the US! definelty this will speeding up initial requests of static content
across the world.
Firebase expanded this to also include rewriting of URLs in Firebase hosting to cloud functions in regions other than US central one.
So now, you can configure your cloud functions to serve dynamic content to run in a specific region close to your users. And then you can set up hosting to access it in that same region.
Here’s an example of that.
You don’t even need to specify the region in the snippet, as Firebase CLI will try to figure it out automatically when you run Firebase deploy.
Since all network traffic now stays close to the users of your app, the performance improvements can be significant, as you can see in this chart
where Firebase uses cloud functions to access a real-time database.
The latency drop from 275 milliseconds to just 75 milliseconds.
Leaving notes on a crash reporting Crashlytics allows your team to comment on specific issues with things like questions, status updates, and more.
5. Firebase recently started tracking the author of each node and now displays that information in a Crashlytics console.
This makes it much easier for users to track down who left a specific note and follow up with them.
6. Last month, Firebase had a big announcement about the optional Firebase authentication with an identity platform upgrade.
This added SAML way support, blocking cloud functions, multi-factor authentication, and much more to Firebase.
Multifactor authentication is now also supported in Flutter. The API changes just landed in Firebase SDKs for Flutter developers. Firebase also added support in the Firebase UI bindings for Flutter.
Upgrade to the latest version of Firebase Flutter libraries to start using multifactor authentication.
Thank you!
