Firebase4j

++++++++++ UPDATE DECEMBER 2019 -- CAVEAT EMPTOR! As much as I love seeing people's interest in my project, it is very dated and not well-supported (for lack of time and interest); I approve other people's pull-requests to it but otherwise am not really maintaining it much. It was started as a POC and then one day I woke up and people were just using it (totally fine by me, but buyer-beware and all that). If this project actually fills a gap that is not provided by the official tooling, then I am totally open to people submitting pull-requests for new features and keeping the project going; but when I created this project I wrapped the Firebase REST API because they had no official Java support -- however, these days, that is no longer true (they do!). ++++++++++

Note: THIS PROJECT IS STILL IN ALPHA.

UPDATE: if you want to bring this into a Maven-project, Jitpack can dynamically make it available to you (I haven't tried this in several years, hopefully it still works): https://jitpack.io/p/bane73/firebase4j

REQUIREMENTS

In order to use this project, you must first acquire a Firebase workspace-
url. You can obtain a workspace-url by signing up for early-access to their
private-beta.

Alternatively, you can run through their tutorial and then use the auto-
generated workspace-url the tutorial provides you with. This url, however, 
is transient so don't put any data in there you want to keep around.

You should also review the Firebase documentation and tutorial, as this 
interface is only meant to provide a thin wrapper around their REST API.

Their REST API documentation can be found at:
	http://www.firebase.com/docs/rest-api.html
	
Their tutorial can be found at:
	http://www.firebase.com/tutorial/

CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY

This project currently supports GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE to perform real-
time notifications to clients from the back-end.  However, the reverse is 
not true; so, if a client updates the firebase-data, the back-end will not 
automatically be aware of it.

You could theoretically implement some sort of polling and delta-parsing on 
the back-end in order to accomplish this, but this wrapper does not (yet?) 
take care of that for you.

Of course, if your clients are also subscribing directly to the firebase-
data, they would naturally be made aware of any changes by another client 
since this is existing native behavior of the Firebase API.

"LOOK, MA, NO HANDS!" (but they aren't tied either!)

The goal of this project is to do all of the mundane-lifting for you, but 
efforts have been made to do this in a flexible enough way that it doesn't 
limit you too much either.  

So, this project allows you to interact with the firebase exclusively using 
Map<String, Object>.

However, should you need or want to, you can opt to both provide your own 
JSON as well as work directly with the JSON returned by the firebase.

Hopefully I have achieved the best balance between ease-of-use and 
flexibility; please feel free to contact me with your input if you think I 
can do a better job of achieving that goal.

EXAMPLE (for more example-code, refer to the Demo.java file)

// create the firebase
Firebase firebase = new Firebase( your_firebase_workspace_url );

// exclude .json extension if it's not needed (ie, working with Firebase Authentication REST API)
Firebase firebase = new Firebase( your_firebase_workspace_url, false );

// PUT a map of some data into the firebase
Map<String, Object> dataMap = new LinkedHashMap<String, Object>();
dataMap.put( "PUT", "This was PUT into your workspace root" );
response = firebase.put( dataMap );

// GET the map back out of the firebase
response = firebase.get();
System.out.println( response );

// alternatively, you can get a few details about the response
response.getSuccess(); 	// true/false if method finished successfully
response.getCode(); 	// http-code of method-request
response.getBody();	// a map of the data returned
response.getRawBody();	// the data returned in it's raw-form (ie: JSON)

// another alternative, you can PUT/POST your own JSON if you want
response = firebase.put( "PUT2", "{ 'key': 'Some value' }" );

BUGS

Please submit all bugs to: https://github.com/bane73/firebase4j/issues

Copyright (c) 2012 by Brandon Gresham.  See LICENSE.txt for details.

Firebase4j

Install / Use

README