emberfire
The officially supported adapter for using Firebase with Ember Data, providing realtime bindings and offline persistence.
What is emberfire?
EmberFire is the officially supported adapter for integrating Firebase with Ember.js applications. It provides Ember Data adapters for Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database, enabling realtime data synchronization, offline persistence, and authentication integration. The project solves the problem of connecting Ember's structured data layer with Firebase's scalable backend services.
Ember.js developers building realtime applications who want to use Firebase as their backend without sacrificing Ember Data conventions and developer experience.
Developers choose EmberFire because it's maintained by the Firebase team, provides seamless integration with Ember Data, offers realtime updates out of the box, and supports offline persistence and server-side rendering through Fastboot compatibility.
Overview
The officially supported adapter for using Firebase with Ember
Use Cases
Best For
- Building realtime Ember applications with live data updates
- Creating offline-capable Ember apps with Firebase backend
- Integrating Firebase Authentication with Ember Simple Auth or Torii
- Adding Google Analytics tracking to Ember Router routes
- Server-side rendering Ember apps with Firebase data using Fastboot
- Migrating existing Ember apps to use Firebase as the backend
Not Ideal For
- Production-critical applications requiring official Firebase support and SLAs
- Teams using JavaScript frameworks outside the Ember.js ecosystem
- Projects anticipating a future migration away from Firebase backend services
Pros & Cons
Pros
Maintained by the Firebase team, ensuring expert development and alignment with Firebase SDK updates, as highlighted in the README.
Provides adapters for Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database, enabling realtime updates and offline persistence directly within Ember Data models, simplifying backend integration.
Includes mixins like RealtimeRouteMixin and AnalyticsRouteMixin for easy realtime bindings and Google Analytics tracking, reducing boilerplate code.
Supports offline persistence with FirestoreAdapter and is Fastboot compatible, allowing for improved performance and user experience in varied environments.
Cons
Marked as experimental and not a supported Firebase product, meaning issues are handled on a best-effort basis with no guaranteed stability or timely fixes.
The master branch is for version 3, a work in progress, leading to potential breaking changes and incomplete documentation for early adopters, as warned in the README.
Deeply tied to both Ember.js and Firebase, making it difficult to switch to other frameworks or backend services without significant refactoring effort.
Requires careful alignment of Ember Data, Firebase SDK, and EmberFire versions per the compatibility table, increasing upgrade complexity and risk.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
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ember-local-storageThe addon provides a storageFor computed property that returns a proxy and persists the changes to localStorage or sessionStorage. It ships with an ember-data adapter.
ember-django-adapterEmber CLI addon adapter for Django REST Framework
ember-localforage-adapterOffline usage for Ember Data, based on localstorage adapter, but now uses Mozilla's localforage as data source
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