firebaseui-web VS Papercups

One great product that can be used for authentication is Clerk but we currently use the default Firebase authentication system as it works pretty well. Firebase even has a separate package called firebaseui-web that helps one set up Firebase authentication without writing any UI code.

In this example, you can see how flexible and customizable the library is. For full documentation, you can see the github repository page here.

Firebase authentication allows for the complete customization of the entire authentication experience for beginners with speed and ease. Nobody sets out to build a bespoke authentication solution unless your business is identity like Auth0. Firebase authentication provides an open-source user interface (UI) library which streamlines building diverse authentication flows for a great user experience. These flows come with the wisdom of years of UX research optimizing the authentication on Google, Youtube, and Android to get you started.

SvelteKit, Serverless, Backendless.com

SvelteKit[1] is a framework for SvelteJS (like Next.js is a framework for ReactJS). I've tried both Svelte and React. Svelte seems to be more elegant and lets me implement my ideas faster with less code. Svelte is very flexible; SvelteKit adds some opinions on how to do things like routing.

SvelteKit also embraces the serverless paradigm[2] (AKA JAMstack[3]). Although a node.js server is still an option, you can also have pages rendered in serverless functions or pre-rendered at build time. Even static pages can be "hydrated" on the client so they are not totally static. So this results in fine-grained SSR (server-side rendering) at the page level. The two main reasons for SSR are performance (especially on mobile devices) and SEO.

Backendless[4] is a VADP/MBaaS. This platform offers a lot of services, but the main one I'm looking at is authentication/identity. I was looking for an authentication service that supports anonymous guest login, social login, as well as traditional email/password login. The other contenders were Google Firebase (slow, and confusing sign in/sign up flow[5]) and AWS Cognito (too complicated/difficult to use). Auth0 was a contender, but they don't support guest logins.

[1]: https://kit.svelte.dev

[2]: https://www.serverless.com

[3]: https://jamstack.org

[4]: https://backendless.com

[5]: https://github.com/firebase/firebaseui-web/issues/665

They provide a web library too - see https://github.com/firebase/firebaseui-web

The best language for the task at hand, when presented with time constraints, is the one that you already know well. OP said in the article that they authored Papercups [1]. Adopting Elixir for a websocket-push service makes a lot of sense, then. However, why don't you learn Elixir, some OTP, and then reconsider that question? You could be missing out.

[1] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups - 5.2k stars, uses Phoenix 1.6

Papercups

Shameless plug here if anyone is interested in an open source live chat tool check out https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

Phoneix - Elixir

We're a live message tool and it is basically what Elixir is built for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups.

The Elixir community has been great and incredibly friendly. I originally was worried about the size of the community but that hasn't been an issue the community has been super helpful. I also think the annual stackoverflow usage surveys are very misleading because most of the community's questions get asked in ElixirForum and not on Stackoverflow.

Phoneix is the web framework of Elixir which is very similar to Rails but minus a lot of the magic has been very helpful for our productivity as well.

If I had to built another service that is websocket heavy I would definitely use Elixir. Even if it was a standard crud app I would still most likely choose Elixir.