Firebase is a powerful technology that is essentially a backend in the cloud; it has a reactive API. AngularFire2 is the name of the library wrapping Firebase. The library is especially made for use with Angular.

It is possible to listen for changes from Firebase. AngularFire2 communicates those changes through RxJS and Observables, which makes it very easy for us to involve Firebase in our apps once we grow the basics of Observables with HTTP.

Hopefully, this has been an educational chapter which has further motivated you to use RxJS in Angular as your choice for anything async.

This chapter has been about the standalone product Firebase. The point was to show that there is a very powerful piece of technology at your fingertips that expands on your newfound knowledge of RxJS.

In the next chapter, we will cover a very important aspect of building Angular applications, namely routing. Routing is a central concept that allows us to divide our application into several logical pages. We talk about logical pages instead of actual pages as we are building an SPA, which is a single page application. What is the difference, you ask? The routing component, which you will read more about in the next chapter, will help you to define components that can be routed to, as well as helping you to define viewports in your application that can be switched out. Think of your application as a passepartout or a frame. Inside the frame of your application, you can define things such as a top menu or left menu, but the painting in the middle is the part of your application that can be switched out.  We call that replaceable part a page.