Firebase is a Google platform that is used in many projects in our group, it provides a backend for our applications both web and mobile. Alberto, Ministry of education predoctoral student working in SyMptOMS platform and Aida, researcher and developer working in EO4GEO project, are using many of the firebase products including a real-time database, cloud functions, analytics, hosting and much more. They both attended the Firebase Summit held on Madrid last week (September 26th) where they announced amazing improvements to the platform which will make developments and deployments more easy and quick.

Among these improvements:

• Firebase Extensions: Piece of code that we will be able to add to our projects to automate tasks such as translating texts, even if its user-generated content, it automatically translates it in the languages specified; sending emails, task that before we had to program ourselves or limit child nodes, an extension to control the maximum number of records you want to save in the database.
• A Firebase Emulator: With this emulator we will be able to test locally new features without risking production data and with no need to be connected to the Internet which will reduce development risks and times.
• AutoML Vision Edge: It has a model already trained to recognize 400 categories of the most relevant items appearing in photos, but if you need a more specialized model, it will allow also to upload folders of photos and it will train the model so we will be able to use it in out projects.

Attendants to the summit also got early access to google.dev, a platform that will contain learning resources for developers and will be opened to general public early 2020. They could also ask new features to the Firebase team, and as GIS lovers they asked spatial queries in the database.

As shown in the pictures we really enjoyed the event!