Jasko, Robert, Bjarne, Kiarokh and Rick are the team behind SurveyLegend, a platform-independent online survey web application built on AngularJS and powered by Firebase.
SurveyLegend is a company focused on reinventing online surveys. Our software enables users to create surveys with remarkable ease, both on tablets and computers. You don’t need to be a market research expert and you don’t have to deal with installing or updating any software programs. All you need is a browser and SurveyLegend’s web app.
We launched our new survey app in June 2014 to help anyone compile questions that need to be answered in an engaging way. We want to give individuals and companies the power to create mobile-friendly, gorgeous surveys comfortably - with a smile on their face. We feel no other solution in our industry has accomplished this.
With SurveyLegend you create great looking surveys on your computer or tablet wherever you are, customize the look of your survey, and display the results with eye-catching and insightful graphics - all as simple as drag and drop.
So far, the results and responses from our users have encouraged us to reinvent the market research industry through ease of use and a focus on interaction design and visuals.
Firebase is a great fit because of the realtime synchronization it provides. There are no conflicts, data which comes in later overwrites or merges with the old data seamlessly. Without Firebase, we would have to spend much more time solving synchronization issues, and optimizing and scaling our servers. Firebase enabled us to build our app more quickly and let us keep our development team small and focused on our core competence.
With Firebase, survey data is always available for respondents and their responses can always be submitted even if our servers go down. Firebase also powers our Live Analytics feature, which updates in realtime when a survey response is submitted so our users get instant feedback.
Firebase’s security rules make it easy to validate data, implement permissions and keep our users’ data safe. It saves us a lot of time and effort that would go into creating custom solutions.
On the server side, we use Linux machines running on DigitalOcean.Export of survey data is written in PHP and more real-time tasks are using NodeJS and CouchDB. We have several Node servers which act as Firebase-workers. The workers save responses and make backups of survey-data to CouchDB in real-time as well as updating Live Analytics on Firebase.
On the client-side, we develop using AngularJS and AngularFire bindings and many other libraries: Sass, Grunt and Gulp for various build tasks. We plan on moving our apps and static assets to Firebase Hosting in the future to increase the availability of our app and reduce the dependency on our own servers.
We are proud to have users from all sectors: individuals, small local businesses, global companies, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and other institutions.
We see high school students use our solution to create small yet powerful surveys, asking challenging questions on the topic of bullying. We also see global enterprises running internal employee surveys and external customer surveys. Every day new users join from all over the world to gather much needed feedback, leading to decisive insight into their questions. Whether it’s individuals or global companies using SurveyLegend, we treat them as Legends and are proud to empower them.
We are working on two new features, Media Gallery and Custom Wallpaper. These features will not only help our users create more visually appealing surveys but will also help them create questions with images as answers.
Media Gallery is a question type guaranteed to help retail, design, and marketing companies with their choices in products, design and marketing. With the Media Gallery question type, you can ask a visual question, easily email it out or share it through social media, reaching thousands of people and leading to insightful choices for your design.
Our second feature in the pipeline is the ability to upload custom survey wallpapers. This is a feature that enables companies to further brand their survey using custom company colors or illustrations.
We have many more features on the way and we love getting feedback and feature requests, so don't be shy about contacting us. We look forward to hearing from you!
Six months ago we released Firebase Hosting! We’ve been amazed by the apps you’ve deployed and we’re excited to see many more to come. Since the launch, our hosting service has had 99.99% uptime and we've seen nearly 6,000 websites deployed a total of 100,000 times. These sites have uploaded more than 700 GB of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, image data, and more to their websites, and many of them are using Firebase to host their own custom domains - including Pathwright and Thinkster.io. If you haven’t tried Firebase Hosting yet, you can dive right in by watching our screencast or checking out the five minute quickstart.
After getting feedback from developers using Firebase Hosting in development and production, I want to share some hints on using the hosting tools effectively.
A common question we see is how to manage different environments with hosting. To start, I’d recommend creating a separate Firebase for each environment (i.e. my-app-dev, my-app-staging, my-app-prod). With our Hacker Plan you can create up to ten free Firebases, and creating multiple Firebases allows you to test things like rewrite rules and redirects before deploying to production. If you have a deploy script, you can easily switch out the name of your Firebase in your app to match your current environment. Only Firebases with a custom domain need to be on a paid plan for Firebase Hosting.
The firebase-tools repo is constantly being improved and a lot of the features explained here have been added since v1.0.0. If you’re on an older version make sure you’ve updated to the latest by running:
npm update -g firebase-tools
You can just as easily run Firebase tools from a script as you would from the command line. Here are a few hints that might make things a little easier:
-s
--email
--password
~/.firebaserc
firebase
firebase.json
--firebase
firebase deploy
Many of you have requested support for uploading user-generated content like images and files in hosting, and improved SEO support in single page apps. Thank you for your feedback - these features are definitely on our roadmap.
We’re always looking for more ways to improve hosting and we’d love to hear what you think. Share your feedback or show us an app you’ve deployed with hosting in our Google Group or mention @Firebase on Twitter.
Yesterday we were at Google Cloud Platform Live in San Francisco. We had a great time introducing developers to Firebase through our booth and two presentations.
Things got started with the keynote, where there were several great new Cloud Platform products announced, including Google Container Engine (GKE) and Google Cloud Interconnect.
Here’s the video from my section of the keynote, where I announce a brand new Firebase feature -- richer querying in Firebase.
Later in the day my co-founder, Andrew, led a session that demonstrated how to create an iOS app with Firebase and built it live on stage in Swift! You can watch his talk and the live coding awesomeness here:
Throughout the day, the Firebase team chatted with developers at our booth and demoed cross-platform apps powered by Firebase. We’ll be open-sourcing our furniture app, Executive Mover 5000, soon, so stay tuned for details.
We’re thrilled to be part of the Cloud Platform team, and over the next few months we’ll be working on new Firebase features as well as integrations with many of Cloud Platform’s services. Thank you to everyone who came to the event and watched on the live stream.
Today we're launching enhanced query support across our iOS, Android, and Web clients, and the Firebase REST API! You can now query your data by any child key in Firebase. Querying has been a frequently requested feature and we’ve made great strides based on developer feedback since our beta release last month.
This release dramatically improves the way you can query your data in Firebase. With our new querying methods you can order and retrieve your data using a child key, by key name, or by priority. Our existing priorities-based ordering will continue to work, but I encourage you to try out the new queries features as it is much more flexible.
A basic Firebase query starts with one of our orderBy functions: orderByChild(), orderByKey() or orderByPriority(). You can then combine these with five other methods to conduct complex queries: limitToFirst(), limitToLast(), startAt(), endAt(), and equalTo(). Since all of us at Firebase agree that dinosaurs are pretty cool, we’ll use this sample firebase of dinosaur facts to demonstrate how you can write complex, realtime queries. To start, we can use orderByChild() to retrieve dinosaurs ordered by height:
orderByChild()
orderByKey()
orderByPriority()
limitToFirst()
limitToLast()
startAt()
endAt()
equalTo()
var ref = new Firebase("https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"); ref.orderByChild("height").on("child_added", function(snapshot) { console.log(snapshot.key() + " was " + snapshot.val().height + " meters tall"); });
Firebase *ref = [[Firebase alloc] initWithUrl:@"https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"]; [[ref queryOrderedByChild:@"height"] observeEventType:FEventTypeChildAdded withBlock:^(FDataSnapshot *snapshot) { NSLog(@"%@ was %@ meters tall", snapshot.key, snapshot.value[@"height"]); }];
Firebase ref = new Firebase("https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"); Query queryRef = ref.orderByChild("height"); postsQuery.addChildEventListener(new ChildEventListener() { @Override public void onChildAdded(DataSnapshot snapshot, String previousChild) { System.out.println(snapshot.getKey() + " was " + snapshot.getValue().get("height") + " meters tall"); } // .... });
curl 'https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs.json?orderBy="height"'
var ref = new Firebase("https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"); ref.orderByChild("weight").limitToLast(2).on("child_added", function(snapshot) { console.log(snapshot.key()); });
Firebase *ref = [[Firebase alloc] initWithUrl:@"https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"]; [[[ref queryOrderedByChild:@"weight"] queryLimitedToLast:2] observeEventType:FEventTypeChildAdded withBlock:^(FDataSnapshot *snapshot) { NSLog(@"%@", snapshot.key); }];
Firebase ref = new Firebase("https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"); Query queryRef = ref.orderByChild("weight").limitToLast(2); queryRef.addChildEventListener(new ChildEventListener() { @Override public void onChildAdded(DataSnapshot snapshot, String previousChild) { System.out.println(snapshot.getKey()); } // .... });
curl 'https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs.json?orderBy="weight"&limitToLast=2'
var ref = new Firebase("https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"); ref.orderByChild("height").startAt(3).on("child_added", function(snapshot) { console.log(snapshot.key()) });
Firebase *ref = [[Firebase alloc] initWithUrl:@"https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"]; [[[ref queryOrderedByChild:@"height"] queryStartingAt:@3] observeEventType:FEventTypeChildAdded withBlock:^(FDataSnapshot *snapshot) { NSLog(@"%@", snapshot.key); }];
Firebase ref = new Firebase("https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs"); Query queryRef = ref.orderByChild("height").startAt(3); queryRef.addChildEventListener(new ChildEventListener() { @Override public void onChildAdded(DataSnapshot snapshot, String previousChild) { System.out.println(snapshot.getKey()); } // .... });
curl 'https://dinosaur-facts.firebaseio.com/dinosaurs.json?orderBy="height"&startAt=3'
The best part is that all these queries will update in realtime as the data changes in your Firebase. There’s more I haven’t covered, so be sure to read the documentation for the iOS, Android or Web clients or the REST API to learn about all the new features.
With querying, we’re also introducing a new indexOn rule type to the Firebase Security and Rules language. You can use indexOn to tell your Firebase which child keys your app uses in queries. A node's key and and priority are indexed automatically, so there is no need to index them explicitly. Using indexOn is optional and can be left off for prototyping, but it will dramatically improve performance so you'll want to add it once you've figured out the indexes your queries will use.
While this represents a big step forward in terms of our querying capabilities it also lays the groundwork for even more improvements. We have a number of exciting features in the pipeline for our SDKs, including more queries improvements. And as always, we'd welcome your feedback on what you'd like to see next.
Let us know what you think in our Google Group or on Twitter, and send any suggestions to firebase-support@google.com.
Over the past three years, we’ve gone from a crazy idea that ‘just might work’ to a proven product used by 110,000 developers. Today, I couldn’t be happier to announce that we’ve joined Google.
Two big reasons.
First, Google’s backing allows us to dramatically scale Firebase. We’re proud of what we’ve built over the last three years, but we’ve only scratched the surface of the opportunity ahead of us. With Google’s engineering talent, resources, and technical infrastructure, we’ll be able to do much more, much faster.
Second, our products and missions are highly complementary. Both the Firebase and Google Cloud Platform teams come to work each day for the same reason: to help developers create extraordinary experiences. By joining forces, Firebase developers will gain access to a powerful cloud infrastructure suite, and Cloud Platform customers will gain access to our rapid development capabilities. Together we’ll deliver a complete platform for mobile and web apps.
Firebase is here to stay and grow. You can continue to count on the same great development experience, tools, libraries and community commitment that have become synonymous with Firebase. If you’re a developer who has built an app on top of Firebase, nothing will change for you, and you can continue to use Firebase as you normally would. We’ll continue to be platform agnostic and provide clients for iOS, Android, the web, and more.
To our developer community, thank you. Building Firebase has been a challenge and you’ve helped immensely with your encouragement and support. Thank you for your API feedback, answering StackOverflow questions, submitting pull requests to our open source projects, and building your apps on Firebase. Many of you have bet your startups and careers on us -- we’re constantly humbled by this and look forward to serving you for many years to come.
You can read Google’s announcement here. Also, we'll be sharing more at Google Cloud Platform Live on November 4th in San Francisco. We'd love for you to join us in person to meet our team and learn about the great things we're working on. If you can't make it, don't worry - everything will be streamed live.
Finally, if you’d like to come and help us write the next chapter of Firebase, we’re hiring.
Happy coding,
James TamplinCo-Founder & CEO
