All right so we've been building up to this moment for the entire module now.
But finally we're ready to talk about Firebase.
Consider our messaging app. When a user types a message into the app and they hit send, that message has
to be saved somewhere on a database somewhere.
So that later on when another user looks at the same chat, they'll be able to see that message show up.
They're essentially getting that data out of the database.
Now in terms of the database, we have two options.
We can either save data locally onto a user's phone or we could put that data into the cloud and save
it onto the Internet.
This is where Firebase comes in. Firebase is going to make it super easy for us to be able to save our
message data and our user details in the cloud by using their pre-built methods and classes.
Now that's only one of the things that you can do with Firebase.
There's actually a whole bunch of things that you can do including hosting your website or using ML
Kit or A/B split testing.
But also we're going to be using it to authenticate our users so that users can sign up to our service
with their email and password and they'll be able to log back in at a later date using that.
And we're going to use Firebase to manage our users details. So once you already, head over to firebase
.google.com and take a look through the documentation and see all the things that it can help
you with.
Now in our module, we're going to be mostly concerned with cloud Firestore which is the latest way of using
Firebase to store data in the cloud.
We're also going to be using the authentication package so that we can log in and register our users.
But first of all, you have to log in using your Google account and then head over to the Firebase console.
And here you're going to add a new project to your firebase console.
Now the project name I'm going to call Flash chat and we'll leave the project ID and locations as it
is but you can uncheck this box if you don't want to share your data with Google and Firebase. Finally
check to agree to the terms and we're ready to go.
So in this page it allows you to choose if you want to give data for certain aspects.
And I'm simply going to leave them all unchecked and go ahead and click Create project.
Now this usually takes about five to 10 seconds and once it's done we can click on the continue button.
And now we're ready to start adding Firebase to our app.