Progressive Web Apps with React

Sending a message to Firebase

To write to the Firebase database, first we grab an instance of it, with firebase.database(). Similar to firebase.auth(), this instance comes with some built-in methods we can use.

The one we will be dealing with in this book is firebase.database().ref(refName). Ref stands for reference, but might be better thought of as a category of our data (in SQL databases, what might make up a table).

If we want to grab the reference to our users, we use firebase.database().ref(‘/users’). For messages, it’s firebase.database().ref(‘/messages’)... and so on. We can now act on this reference in a variety of ways, such as listening to changes (coming later in the chapter), or pushing new data in (which we'll handle right now ...