The Firebase platform helps you develop high-quality apps and focus on your users.

Firebase is a mobile and web application development platform backed by Google. It is a one-stop solution for all your needs to develop high-quality mobile and web applications. It includes various products, such as Realtime Database, Crash reporting, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Storage, Cloud functions, Authentication, Hosting, Test lab for Android, and Performance monitoring for iOS, which can be used to develop and test Realtime applications by focusing on the user's needs, rather than the technical complexities.

It also includes products such as Cloud Messaging, Google Analytics, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Invites, App Indexing, AdMob, and AdWords that help you grow user base and also increase the engagement of your audience.

Firebase provides multiple Firebase services. We can access each service with the Firebase namespace:

• firebase.auth() - Authentication
• firebase.storage() - Cloud Storage
• firebase.database() - Realtime Database
• firebase.firestore() - Cloud Firestore

We'll cover all the preceding services in the upcoming chapters. In this chapter, we will go through the preceding products/services briefly to get a basic understanding of all features of the Firebase platform. In the upcoming chapters, we will explore web-related products  which can integrate with React platform, in more detail.

Here's the list of topics that we'll cover in this section:

• Introduction to Firebase and its features
• List of Firebase Features and how we can use it
• Cloud Firestore
• Firebase project setup with JavaScript
• Sample application "Hello World" with Firebase and JavaScript

As you can see, Firebase offers two types of Cloud Database and Realtime Database, and both support real-time data syncing. We can use both of them in the same application or project. Okay, let's go into detail and learn more about them.