BUILDING A FIREBASE NOTIFICATION SERVICE WITH GRPC AND KTOR (PART 2)
Welcome back! If you haven’t checked out Part 1 already, I highly recommend it before coming here as it goes over the structure of the projects as well as the technologies used in this project. In this part, we will configure the Firebase service’s gRPC server to receive the notification requests. Seeing as this is a Firebase service you need to ensure your Firebase service is configured with the google-services.json file. You can get this from the Firebase console in your project. Once the file is downloaded, you can place this in the resources directory of your project where the server configuration file lives. You can read the google-services.json file with the following piece of code in your Application module file. In this example I’ve created an extension function on the Application class that helps configure this:
BUILDING A FIREBASE NOTIFICATION SERVICE WITH GRPC AND KTOR (PART 1)
Welcome to my tutorial series on building a gRPC service with Firebase and Ktor! Building fast efficient backends have always fascinated me and since delving into this world, I thought I would write about some of the findings I’ve done. Hopefully you gain as much as I did from this experience and find this useful. In this series we will delve into how we can leverage the power of Firebase, gRPC and Ktor by building two internal services that will work together to deliver App notifications to end users on Android. While not shown here, this approach will work on iOS as well.
BUILDING A FIREBASE AUTHENTICATOR FOR KTOR
I’ve been exploring with the Jetbrains web framework ktor for just over a year now thanks to the pandemic, and I must say I absolutely fell in love with this platform. The difficulty though is when you get into a platform that hasn’t yet had the time to mature due to the shiny newness, things can get a bit rough in implementing certain things due to the lack of documentation. Hopefully this post goes a little way in changing that :) This is the first part in a couple of articles I’ll publish about expanding the capabilities of ktor, which I definitely found helpful. Hint: You will need to know a bit about JWT and the authentication capabilities of Firebase to follow along with this article. You may also need to know just a super-high level about ktor pipelines
BUILDING SCALABLE MOBILE API’S
A couple of weeks ago on the 23rd of September, I gave a talk at DVT as part of their tech month meet-ups. The talk went into how we could take a ktor-based mobile API, wrap it up in gRPC for our other ktor api-based services, and get the app live using Hashicorp’s products Nomad and Consul, then serving them using Fabio, a zero-conf load balancer for Hashicorp’s consul that works really well. As much as I wanted to go into the code and the way everything was implemented I couldn’t, as time was a bit short on my side. What I will do however is probably publish a series of blog posts that go into each part in detail. Watch this space
GDG JOHANNESBURG – TECH INTERVIEW TIPS
Hello! Yesterday I chaired a Google Developers Group Meetup panel that discussed a couple of things in the hiring space for tech people. We went into questions such as how important it is to get a degree before applying for a position and how gender is affecting the climate as a lot of people in tech are still predominantly males, amongst other questions. You can watch the event here: