I think you're vastly underestimating what Firebase offers, which you presumably didn't do in 100 lines of code:
1) Full user management services, including registration and password recovery
2) Extremely fine-tuned access control per resource
3) Complete, tested front-end libraries for AngularJS, Backbone, and other popular frontend libraries.
4) Much more reliability than socket.io in providing cross-platform, cross-mobile real-time messaging (believe me I've used and tested socket.io). socket.io may or may not work on a given platform, and it's no longer a very active project, either.
5) Full admin panel for database, including real-time data updates.
Look, for a chat app, you're absolutely correct that Firebase may be overkill. But very few of us that rely on Firebase for applications are limiting ourselves to chat apps.
That said, I'm not happy about this acquisition. And this is probably the last time I'll be burned like this by a PaaS company. I saved a lot of time by going with Firebase (much more than 100 lines of code) but I'm questioning whether it was worth it.
PS: I didn't downvote, although I was tempted after reading your "Why not learn" remark. I think you're right in the end that open source is the best solution, but you're very wrong to assume that people are using Firebase because they can't quite figure out how to make a 100-line Node app.
Yes, it's picking back up now, but for a while it languished (half of 2013 with no commits, for example).
Also, check out the number of issues, some of which are pretty significant (although there are tons of ridiculous ones there, too). But if they're catching up -- and they appear to be -- that's great. It's a great project.
1) Full user management services, including registration and password recovery 2) Extremely fine-tuned access control per resource 3) Complete, tested front-end libraries for AngularJS, Backbone, and other popular frontend libraries. 4) Much more reliability than socket.io in providing cross-platform, cross-mobile real-time messaging (believe me I've used and tested socket.io). socket.io may or may not work on a given platform, and it's no longer a very active project, either. 5) Full admin panel for database, including real-time data updates.
Look, for a chat app, you're absolutely correct that Firebase may be overkill. But very few of us that rely on Firebase for applications are limiting ourselves to chat apps.
That said, I'm not happy about this acquisition. And this is probably the last time I'll be burned like this by a PaaS company. I saved a lot of time by going with Firebase (much more than 100 lines of code) but I'm questioning whether it was worth it.
PS: I didn't downvote, although I was tempted after reading your "Why not learn" remark. I think you're right in the end that open source is the best solution, but you're very wrong to assume that people are using Firebase because they can't quite figure out how to make a 100-line Node app.