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[Firebase Developer Advocate]

Firebase does work offline if your app loses network connectivity temporarily (details here: https://www.firebase.com/docs/web/guide/offline-capabilities...). All data written while offline is stored in memory and is synced to the Firebase servers when your client reconnects. We’re working on improving offline support when your app goes into the background, and we currently have a beta version of this available for our iOS (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/firebase-talk/dOocEtjQz4w/ss...) and Android (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/firebase-talk/gYlnLgQ-Yhk/It...) SDKs.

If you scroll down to the "Fireside Chats" section on the customers page (https://www.firebase.com/customers/) you can see some examples

[Firebase Dev Advocate] This is great, thank you for sharing!

[Firebase Dev Advocate] Glad you're enjoying Firebase! Attaching a listener to the "items" Firebase is disabled. This is because it would send every item from HN to your computer. You'll need to attach a listener to the individual item instead. The "permission denied" error is coming from the security rules on the HN Firebase (https://www.firebase.com/docs/security/quickstart.html). If you're trying to find out what the latest updates are, they're kept in the /updates node (https://github.com/HackerNews/API#changed-items-and-profiles).

If you use the Firebase SDKs the request is sent over a reused full duplex socket rather than creating new/individual connections.

Yeah, unfortunately, I'm trying to not use any closed source stuff in the app. Going to write some service layer stuff for it

[Firebase Dev Advocate] @angersock - the "about" value you're seeing on the Firebase Dashboard isn't broken, it's just a truncated preview. The HN team is using email for issues, so you can send them any feedback at api@ycombinator.com.

Ah, cool. There was no warning of that fact--maybe you could add that?

[Firebase Dev Advocate] @airlocksoftware - Yes, you should make separate requests for each story. You can attach a listener to the topstories node (https://www.firebase.com/docs/web/guide/retrieving-data.html...) and when that’s triggered, you can make a request for the data on each story. Using the Firebase SDK, each request will get made using the same connection. I'd recommend using our SDK instead of the REST API so you don't have to worry about managing your own connections and retries.

Here's an example showing all topstories and updating in realtime. Obviously, in JS, but the other Firebase SDKs are similar: http://jsfiddle.net/firebase/96voj1xh/

[Firebase Dev Advocate here] We don't currently have rate limits. I'd recommend using our SDKs, they handle connections more efficiently than dealing with the REST API. You can also run your own server process using our Node (https://www.npmjs.org/package/firebase) or Java libraries (https://www.firebase.com/docs/android/quickstart.html).

Thanks for answering.

I'd rather use the REST API directly, for what I need is rather simple and not downloading, installing and maintaining an SDK is more appealing. (My app was developed a while ago and was doing HTML scraping, but the 30-second limit on HN killed it, because of testing -- I don't need to query more often than twice per minute, but while testing I ran the thing a little too often).

So, what are the limits on the REST API, and how do limits work? (A max number of requests per hour would be better than per minute for example).

Any kind of rate limitations with the REST API we should be made aware of?

You really want to use the Firebase SDKs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8423055

There are currently no rate limits on the REST API.

This implies that your SDKs don't use your own REST API. What do they use instead?

We establish a websocket connection and fall back to long polling when appropriate. This SO question has more details: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12591011/firebase-with-mo...

[Firebase Community Manager here] I'm interested in seeing Firelaunch when your friend open sources yet!

Working on it now. Hopefully I'll be done with it soon. Coding with my left hand only. Right hand has stitches!

I could add you on GH so that you can give me feedback on it. Let me know if you are interested.