Learn Babel, Firebase and Particle

Protect yourself from unexpected charges by learning how to use Firebase emulators. 

By using Firebase emulators you no longer have to create a second dev firebase project to avoid using production data. You also don't run the risk of having a cloud function crash and run up a huge bill.

In this course, you'll learn how to set up and use Firebase's authentication, function, and Firestore emulators. You will also learn how to safely set up Cloud Function emulation, import seed data into your emulators, and disable the emulators in production.  

By the end of this course, you'll be able to confidently set up a safe environment for testing in your own applications!

firebase

Local App Development with the Firebase Emulator Suite

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

We can write our package using the latest JavaScript syntax with a compilation step. In this lesson we will install `babel-cli` and `babel-preset-latest` and wire up a `build` script to compile our code using the babel “latest” preset when source files change. This means those using our package can use it in any version of JavaScript even though we are using the latest syntax for our source code.

Set up compilation of source code using babel with npm scripts

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

The Firebase Forge provides a convenient GUI for visualizing and manipulating your data in real-time. Be sure to check out [this lesson](https://egghead.io/lessons/angularjs-get-started-with-firebase-and-angularfire) for getting Firebase setup.

Updating Real-Time Data with Firebase Forge

When using Firebase collections in your AngularJS application, you have access to a handy set of events emitted by the collection when changes in your data occur. Be sure to check out the [first lesson](https://egghead.io/lessons/angularjs-get-started-with-firebase-and-angularfire) in this series for the project source code.

Firebase Event Handling

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

Firebase provides a real-time syncing backend for your AngularJS applications in very few lines of code. In this lesson, you'll learn how to get started integrating it into your app.

Get Started with Firebase and AngularFire

Data has relationships, and Firebase allows you to define those relationships in your AngularJS applications.

Firebase Data Relationships

Firebase has several ways to provide authentication for your AngularJS application. In this lesson, Lukas will look at the most basic email/password approach.

Firebase Basic Authentication Part 1

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

React becomes incredibly powerful when coupled with a real-time backend like Firebase. See how easy it is to bring the two together and chat with Star Wars characters while you're at it.

React and Firebase with ReactFire

Babel is a compiler that lets us right future JavaScript not yet fully in browsers (ES6 / ES2015, ES7 / ES2016, etc) and transpile it back into code that can be used now. We'll walk through installing babel, writing some future JS syntax, transpiling it, and running it in a browser.

**This lesson is out of date and uses an older version of Babel.**

Writing next generation JavaScript with Babel 5 (out of date)

Authenticating with Firebase creates a 24 hour session for the user. This allows you to fetch the current session for the user, as well as logout the user and destroy the session.

Firebase Basic Authentication Part 2

webpack is a tool to build JavaScript modules in your application. To start using webpack from its cli or api, follow the Installation instructions. webpack simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your application and bundling them in the right order. webpack can be configured to customise optimisations to your code, to split vendor/css/js code for production, run a development server that hot-reloads your code without page refresh and many such cool features.

webpack

Webpack loaders are how you tell webpack to resolve your dependencies and you can use a loader built for the babel transpiler to easily enable ES6 code in your project. Full sourcemap support is also available using webpack's devtool property.

Webpack Loaders, Source Maps, and ES6

particle

Before powering up the Particle Photon we are going to look at what each of the components are on the board.

Particle Photon Component Overview

In this lesson, we’ll install Babel and use it from the terminal to see how it can take JavaScript that uses modern language features and output JavaScript that will run in down-level browsers.

Transform Modern JavaScript Features with Babel

In this lesson, we'll configure webpack to use the Babel loader for our JavaScript files, allowing us to transpile our source files and generate a bundle for deploying our application.

Configure webpack to Load JavaScript Files through Babel with babel-loader

In this lesson, we'll add React and ReactDOM to our project and create an entry point for the React application. We'll also configure Babel with the React preset so Babel can transpile our JSX into JavaScript that will run in a browser.

Configure babel for React with preset-react

We transpile our JavaScript code so we can use modern language features, even if browser support isn't quite where we need it to be. This includes proposed features that aren't yet part of the official language specification. In this lesson, we'll see how we can support the proposed class property syntax for JavaScript with a Babel plugin.

Support Proposed JavaScript Features with Babel Plugins

Converting all of our modern JavaScript into ES5 compatible syntax is a great way to use modern features while targeting older browsers. What happens when the browsers natively support these language features? Then it no longer makes sense to transform that code or to include polyfills that will go unused. In this lesson, we’ll add the `@babel/polyfill` package and configure `babel-preset-env`

Target specific browsers with babel-preset-env and the babel pollyfill

One approach to building high performance applications with `webpack` is to take advantage of code-splitting to only load the needed JavaScript on initial load and asynchronously load additional JavaScript bundles when needed. In this lesson, we'll create add some code-splitting to our placeholder application and configure our project to support the dynamic `import()` syntax.

Asynchronously Load webpack Bundles through Code-splitting and React Suspense

We take the opengraph image we wrote in codesandbox and copy it into our serverless function. We use Rollup to compile the component into an IIFE (immediately invoked function expression) that can run in our headless browser environment and cover a wide set of rollup plugins that we need for compatibility. We end the lesson having successfully screenshot our opengraph react component from our Netlify Function

**Note**:  Due to Netlify changing their handling, the path in `fs.readFileSync` is affected. Update to:
```js
const script = fs.readFileSync(path.resolve(__dirname, "image.js"), "utf-8");
```

Compiling a React to an IIFE with Rollup to execute and render in a headless browser

🔥 Firebase provides several easy-to-use authentication methods that we can use to handle auth in React apps. 

In this lesson, we will cover how to authenticate a user via an email and password. This is done using `createUserWithEmailAndPassword` function available to us from the `firebase` library. 

You'll need firebase configured in your application which you can [read about here.](https://dev.to/farazamiruddin/react-firebase-add-firebase-to-a-react-app-4nc9)