Hi, I'm Tim! I’m the newest member of the Firebase UX Team. I've been an avid Ember user for two years, and I've spent my first few weeks at Firebase adding new features to EmberFire. On the UX team, I’ll be working on building out features in the App Dashboard.

Last week Sara and I attended EmberConf 2015 in Portland, Oregon. We had a great time meeting a ton of awesome people in the Ember community and hearing about what's coming up for Ember in 2015. After getting feedback from many of you, today we're releasing some new features in EmberFire, our official bindings for EmberJS.

As Ember development moves towards Ember CLI, the latest release includes much better CLI support - you can easily install EmberFire as a CLI addon and the FirebaseAdapter will automatically be initialized in your application adapter. This release also adds support for querying your Firebase data. Details on both new features are below. Also, a special thanks to Matt Sumner for his contributions to this release on GitHub.

Improved CLI Support

EmberFire now supports ES6 modules and is packaged as an Ember CLI addon by default. You can get started with EmberFire in your CLI app in two steps:

1. Install EmberFire

From your CLI app’s directory, run the command:

$ ember install emberfire

This will add Firebase as a dependency in your bower.json file and generate app/adapters/application.js for you.

2. Add your Firebase URL

The ApplicationAdapter generated by running the install command references the config.firebase variable in your config/environment.js file. Next, update your Firebase URL to that file:

$ firebase: 'https://YOUR-FIREBASE-NAME.firebaseio.com/'

Now your Firebase data will automatically be synced with the Ember Data store.

The latest release also loosens our Ember Data requirement. You can use EmberFire with Ember Data beta-11 through beta-14.x.

You can run our example blog app by running ember serve from the root of the emberfire/ directory.

For those of you who aren’t using Ember CLI yet, don't worry - you can still use EmberFire! Just include EmberFire and it’s dependencies in your HTML from our CDN. Check out the instructions in our guide for details.

Querying Data in Firebase

When we released additional querying methods, many of you asked for direct support for this in EmberFire. This 1.4.1 release includes findQuery support! You can now use Ember’s findQuery method to order your Firebase data by a specified child or by key. Using this sample Firebase of dinosaur facts as an example, the following query will return the two tallest dinosaurs:

//app/routes/dinosaurs.js
export default Ember.Route.extend({
    model: function() {
        return this.store.find('dinosaur', {
            orderBy: 'height',
            limitToLast: 2
        });
    }
});

Check out the EmberFire documentation on findQuery for more details.

We'd like your feedback!

Finally, we’d like to hear what you think as we continue to improve EmberFire. We encourage you to submit a PR on GitHub, and share your feature requests with us @Firebase on Twitter or in the comments below. We’re excited to see what you build with Firebase and Ember!

Important note:  Firebase private backups have changed since this blog post. Please see the updated details here.

We've built a new feature for Firebase that is now ready for an expanded beta. Private backups is an advanced feature for customers on our Bonfire plan or above that backs up your Firebase data every night and uploads it to Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3 buckets.
On a daily basis, we will back up your Firebase data and security rules and then upload them to a timestamped folder in your cloud bucket. This folder will contain a .json file with the Firebase data as well as a security_rules.txt file with the security rules data. We can also encrypt backups using PGP encryption before uploading them to the cloud.

Main Use Cases

Customers have been requesting this feature for a variety of use cases.

Offline analysis

Private backups provides offline access to Firebase data so you can crawl and analyze your data without affecting the realtime performance of their your customers' connections to Firebase.

Historical record keeping

Since Firebase data is realtime, it is useful to have historical snapshots of the database. You can retroactively analyze their data to look for trends and make investigations based on past data points.

Ingestion into Analytics Products

Private Backups provides a perfect pipeline into cloud analytics products such as Google’s BigQuery. Cloud Analytics products often prefer to ingest data through Cloud Storage buckets rather than directly from the application.

Restores of corrupted or lost data

With private backups, you can restore your data yourself in the event of data corruption or loss, increasing the reliability of and control over your application. Note that for large Firebases it is still much more efficient to contact us to restore your data from our own system backups rather than through the .json files of private backups.

How to sign up

The Firebase Private Backups Beta is currently available to Bonfire level and higher customers.
If you are interested in this feature, please contact support and we will email you back with instructions on how to setup your cloud bucket to receive the scheduled backups.

Today we’re excited to introduce version 1.0 of AngularFire. This new release focuses on enhancing two characteristics of AngularFire: stability and simplicity.

Stable API

With a 1.0 release we will guarantee backwards-compatibility with all future 1.x.x releases. We would like to thank those who built amazing apps during the beta. Without your support and feedback AngularFire wouldn't be what it is today.

Simpler API

The goal of AngularFire is to remove the complexity of synchronizing collections. The 1.0 release removes the overlap between the Firebase SDK and the AngularFire library. AngularFire is now focused on on what it’s good at: synchronized bindings. We've removed the $firebase service in favor of two new services: $firebaseArray and $firebaseObject. Authentication through the $firebaseAuth service is already stable and remains unchanged.

$firebaseArray and $firebaseObject

The $firebase service added an unnecessary step to the synchronization process. The 1.0 release cuts right to the chase. If you need a synchronized array, inject the $firebaseArray service and pass it a reference:

app.controller("Ctrl", function($scope, $firebaseArray) {
  var ref = new Firebase("https://<YOUR-FIREBASE-APP>.firebaseio.com");
  $scope.items = $firebaseArray(ref);
});

It's a similar process to use $firebaseObject to create a synchronized object:

app.controller("Ctrl", function($scope, $firebaseObject) {
  var ref = new Firebase("https://<YOUR-FIREBASE-APP>.firebaseio.com");
  $scope.obj = $firebaseObject(ref);
});

These new services are functionally equivalent to the $asArray() and $asObject() methods present in AngularFire 0.9. For example, the 0.9 $firebase(ref).$asArray() method returns the same array as the 1.0 $firebaseArray(ref).

$extend()

The 0.8 release introduced the $extendFactory() method on arrays and objects. This powerful method provided transformations on AngularFire to fit your own model's behavior. In the 1.0 release we've renamed it to $extend().

script
app.factory("ArrayWithSum", function($firebaseArray) {
  return $firebaseArray.$extend({
    sum: function() {
      var total = 0;
      angular.forEach(this.$list, function(rec) {
        total += rec.x;
      });
      return total;
    }
  });
});

You may notice that the new operator is now optional for $firebaseArray and $firebaseObject. However, when using $extend(), we must always use the new operator.

app.controller("ArrayCtrl", function($scope, ArrayWithSum) {
  var ref = new Firebase("https://<YOUR-FIREBASE-APP>.firebaseio.com");
  $scope.data = new ArrayWithSum(ref);
});

Improved Documentation

We take pride in our documentation at Firebase. Now that AngularFire has hit 1.0, it deserves a guide with an expanded structure that mirrors our other SDKs. We’ve paved the way for continued updates to add relevant samples and sections.

Visit the new docs for a step-by-step development guide on mastering AngularFire.

CommonJS Support

For those of you who love require(), AngularFire 1.0 is the release for you. Angular 1.4 and AngularFire 1.0 now support CommonJS:

var angular = require("angular");
var angularfire = require("../angularfire");

Migration Path from 0.9 to 1.0

We are providing a migration guide to upgrade from previous versions. The migration guide can be found here.

Feedback is welcome

We want to know what you think of the new features. Drop a comment below or send us any feedback on our Angular Google Group.

For more information check out the new in-depth guide. Or for a crash course, visit the AngularFire quickstart or try the five minute tutorial.