In case anyone would like to compare, here's a similar example using Angular and Firebase:

http://firebase.github.io/angularFire/examples/chat/

Source: https://github.com/firebase/angularFire/tree/gh-pages/exampl...

And here is the 14 line jQuery version.

https://www.firebase.com/tutorial/#session/pxkpekf5ze3

Would love to see your angular demo implement authentication.

Also, your angular demo uses angularfire.js.

It's not my demo, it's firebase's demo. Why should it not use angularfire?

Cool! Mine is a bit more complex for a few reasons, mainly the usage of Firebase's authentication API, since I wanted to show a very basic example of "real world" usage. Still, thank you for posting for comparison :)

Regarding Firebase: * How do you access logs * How do you email users * How do you run cron-like jobs * How are passwords stored? Are they salted? AES256 encryption?

I've been reading the docs and questions like these are not readily accessible.

Firebase engineer here. For things like chron jobs / emails / any logging you want to do, you can run a node server that uses the javascript SDK. That lets you do things like, "any time a user writes to this location, send an email with the contents of the data".

You can also observe arbitrary data changes and log any info that is relevant to you.

As for passwords, we have a few details here at the bottom of the page here: https://www.firebase.com/docs/security-quickstart.html

The short answer is that we use bcrypt for password storage.

Hope that helps!

A node server that I run on my server accesses Firebase through the SDK, right?

Correct. There's a quickstart guide for using the Node SDK here: https://www.firebase.com/docs/nodejs-quickstart.html

You can also use the REST API (https://www.firebase.com/docs/rest-api-quickstart.html) to interact with Firebase from any platform.

As the Firebase engineer posted you can use Node.js, OR ANYTHING YOU WANT, remember you are not forced to use JavaScript for everything, that's the beauty of *nix, if CRON worked for ages, why not just use cron and a perl script or simila?.

I absolutely love Firebase. It's dead simple to setup and a pleasure to use.

Have you tried Meteor? I've been comparing the two.

I haven't played around too much with Meteor actually. Both seem like great technologies though. I've been using Firebase to store data whereas I know with Meteor you can still roll Mongo or any other DB.