FB4D – The OpenSource Cross-Platform Library for Firebase

The Google Firebase Cloud Database is used in many mobile and web applications worldwide and there are well-documented libraries for many languages and platforms. For Delphi, the cross-platform library FB4D supports the Firebase Realtime Database, the Firestore Database, the Firebase Storage (for file storage), and Firebase Functions (for calling server functions). For authentication, FB4D currently supports email/password authentication and anonymous login.

The library builds on the Firebase REST-API and provides all functionality with synchronous and asynchronous methods for the usage within GUI application, services and background threads. Both frameworks VCL and Firemonkey are supported. The library is a pure source code library and relies on class interfaces. For clean and short application code it supports fluent interface design.

Wiki

This project offers a wiki. Four example applications and a Getting-Started on the wiki will help you to start working with the library. For more detailed questions, the interface reference will provide the answers you need.

You can find more learning videos on the following YouTube channel.

Major Change log

This log informs about interface changes and important library enhancements that need the attention of users of this library.

• March 8, 2021: Real Time Database creation has changed within the Firebase Console. The Firebase ID is no longer sufficient to access newly created RT DBs. A Firebase URL is now required, which can also include the server location. See more details.

• March 5, 2021: A new listener detects changes within the Firestore Database without pooling. See more details.

Prerequisites

This library requires at least Delphi 10.3 Rio. The sample projects are developed with Delphi 10.4.1 Sydney and are ready for Delphi 10.4.2.

Hint: Support from Delphi 10 Seattle to Delphi 10.2 Tokyo has been discontinued since the introduction of the Firestore Listener in March 2021.

Hint: Delphi 10.3 Update 1 is not longer supported because of an issue in the RTL.

Delphi is a registered trademark of Embarcadero Technologies, Inc.

Supported Platforms

FB4D is developed in pure object pascal and can be used with Firemonkey on all supported plattforms. The library and its sample projects are currently tested with Win64/Win32, Mac64/32, Linux64 by using FMXLinux, iOS64 and Android. (Hint to mobile platforms: The TokenJWT to perform the token verifcation requires the installation of the OpenSSL libraries). For more information about using OpenSSL see the installation of OpenSSL

Limitation on Linux64

Due to a bug in the Linux RTL, all HTTPRequests that transfer data to the server by using the Patch method are currently not working. Put and Post methods work. This affects the Realtime DB method Patch and the Firestore method InsertOrUpdateDocument for both synchronous and asynchronous accesses. This bug affects all Delphi version which supports Linux64 up to the newest Delphi 10.4.2.

For more information check and vote for RSP-33177

Submodules

For authorization token verification and token content extraction this library uses the Delphi JOSE JWT library. Thank you Paolo Rossi for your great library!

https://github.com/paolo-rossi/delphi-jose-jwt