Is Using Firebase As The Intermediary Between Angularjs And Nodejs A 'bad' Idea?

I'm looking for feedback on how to architect a system I'm building. I have a few Node.JS scripts updating a Firebase DB. I then have a few front-end AngularJS apps reading the data

Solution 1:

Use Firebase.

If you're using Firebase as your main datastore I would strongly advice against directly talking to your Node backend. Having to connect your Angular app to your Node script would require a lot of needless overhead that Firebase helps reduce.

If you want to setup a connection to your backend you would have to expose and endpoint for your Angular app to talk to you. You would also have to use AJAX or some web socket implementation to send the data. This doesn't make sense since Firebase is already handling your data transport.

For doing any backend type tasks, like sending an email, you can hook up a listener and that will help you fire off those emails whenever you indicate something has updated.

In your app it could look like this:

$scope.ref = $firebase(new Firebase('<your-firebase>/emailsToSend'));
$scope.updateOnClick = function() {
   var email = // get this somehow$scope.ref.$push(email);
};

Then on your Node JS server

varref = new Firebase('<your-firebase>/emailsToSend');
// this is a dummy object for the example onlyvar emailClient = new EmailClient(); 
ref.on('child_added', function(snap) {
   var emailToSend = snap.val();
   // send email
   emailClient.send(email, function afterSend() {
     // if you can hook into when the email has sent // delete the data afterwards
     snap.ref().remove();
   });
});

For services like sending emails you might want to look into Zapier. They hook into Firebase and handle these events for you.