reactfire VS django-rest-framework

ReactFire

Are you using Firebase? If not, you probably should. You can call functions (with Auth) from your react app. There's a framework you can use to help: https://github.com/FirebaseExtended/reactfire

I was an early developer at Firebase. I think we made Firebase so easy to use and never spoke on about the technicals that the whole software ecosystem now underestimates the complexity involved. I see various Firebase competitors asserting various "mistakes it makes" without really understanding what it delivers, which is understandable because we never marketed it like that because we spoke only about how it can help you build easier.

The idea that n queries instead of a join is slow is not as true as you would think. Firestore supports streaming and pipelines at its core, and can reuse cache across operations. At the end of the day, the data goes over a narrow network channel. If you can saturate the channel, and don't leave any gaps, what's the performance difference if the data comes from a single query or many that are back-to-back. The data is transferred to the client either way. Both Firebase databases are pipelined, so this "many round trip" argument is not a decent argument if the client can issue the queries without waiting for responses (such as the code in this article).

The other is consistency levels and correctness. I constantly see devs call Firebase an eventually consistent database which is wrong, its causally consistent [1], and this makes a huge difference when trying to do OLTP. The offline capabilities are built on the consistency primitives, and it's the only way it can work. So while this convex article is banging on about "End-to-End Correctness Philosophy", they miss the most important quality of correctness, and if they are not careful, will miss the required engineering, and then be unable to deliver an offline cache over real-time streams. I see this playing out with Supabase, I warned them personally before they got into YCombinator that what they were building was not causally consistent. Since then, they have had to rearchitect their real-time features after shipping them. (I have not reviewed their latest design yet so I have no idea whether they have it right yet).

Many things sucked about Firebase. The bespoke security rules and the lack of views. So Convex is on the money shipping functions on the backend. I think Supabase is shipping competitors' mistakes with row-level security language. Personally, I think Firebase's mistakes can be fixed with the addition of an open-source Firebase server [1], as the clients are already open source and the mistakes are all to do with just the server. The real tech was always in the clients anyway (offline cache, connection management, operation queues).

It will be interesting to see if building expressly for React is a good idea. Firebase shipped many adapters, like https://github.com/FirebaseExtended/reactfire, using the "thin-waist" principle of not over-fitting. But Javascript technology moved from callbacks to async while Firebase was in the field, so the current API is not now idiomatic. But convex is setting itself for even more ecosystem fragility, what if React changes API or falls out of favor? This is a big risk! I hope they can roll with whatever happens!

[1] https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/redis-backend-1

Since you mentioned you're also using React, we have a React specific library (ReactFire) that also helps out quite a bit.

Use ReactFire! It's our official library for React and Firebase. It has a bunch of useful hooks that probably handle most of the actions you are looking to do.

This is a quick walkthrough of a code example using ReactFire v4 in an application. The application supports login, logout, create an account, and protected routes. We also walk through two approaches for protecting routes since the AuthCheck component that existed in v3 no longer exists in v4 of ReactFire.

FWIW check out ReactFire, it gives you hooks and context for Firebase. Will likely feel more natural than using the vanilla platform-agnostic SDK.

reactfire

- Django Rest Framework has no async support? https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/issues/7260

A URL shortener is a service that transforms long and complex URLs into short, easily memorable ones. This tutorial guides you through creating a URL shortener using Django REST framework and Postgres, deploying it on Koyeb.

Now, I'm converting this app into a Vue-based SPA (still powered by Django). I'm using the Django REST Framework to build the API that the SPA will interact with. (I'll be using token-based auth, via django-rest-knox. ETA: I'll actually be using djangorestframework-simplejwt.)

For the backend, we chose Python, Django Rest Framework. On the frontend, React, Redux, Saga, Sass. Let’s start with the backend, which was managed by Yegor. He writes about the server part of the project himself.

With regard to JSON API aspects of Django, have you used https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ ? I find it to be very satisfactory.

django-rest-framework and the Fetch API, or

Django REST Framework (DRF) Django REST Framework is a famous, powerful, and flexible toolkit for building Web APIs in Django. It provides a set of reusable components and tools to simplify API development, including serialization, authentication, permissions, and view sets.

I wish Django would take async more seriously. This comment gives a pretty good overview of the current situation (some points are more valid than others): https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/discussions/...

The Python ecosystem is strange. Where other dev communities will embrace new ways of doing things faster than most people can keep up — the Python community needs to be pulled kicking and screaming into the light once ever decade or so. Python 2 to 3, ~10 years.

async/await has been in Python since 2015, it feels like it's going to be another 5 years before we see people taking async seriously in the big packages. Same problem we had during the 2/3 transition. No library support, no developer support.

Thanks for helping Steve to complete his REST API, he is now partying🥳. You can get more information on how to use the Django REST framework to best way read the documentation. There are many alternatives to the Django REST framework, you can give them a try if you want,

[Django Rest Framework](https://www.django-rest-framework.org/) has the very nice idea of a [ViewSet](https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/viewsets/#modelviewset) that allows really minimal code to perform all the basic CRUD actions on a model.