Say I want to make an app that is going to allow users to post pictures of their dogs with Instagram like functionality. Imagine that it also is going to have a massive Wikipedia like library of different dog breeds that users can send complex search queries to. I want to implement the social features using Firebase and for Wikipedia-like part use a seperate server and then create basic REST API to allow for search requests.
I assume that the server side programming should be fairly straightforward: get the search request from user, build an SQL query, execute it and return JSON. Simple enough, but as I understand, Firebase can't even do something as simple as "WHERE foo LIKE '%bar%'", so I don't have much choice here other than having a seperate server and database with SQL. I have a few concerns though.
- Given that this is going to be a mobile app, how viable is that approach?
- Should my mobile app communicate directly with the "dog encyclopedia" server or should my app send all of its queries to Firebase and then let Firebase handle the fetching of data from server?
- Where should I store the images from my database? Should I store them on my server or use Firebase Storage?
