Creating and populating your database with Firebase

So far, we've only used hardcoded data as the source of content for our Restaurants app. Since almost every real application uses dynamic data that comes from a backend server through a REST API, it's time to step up our game and create a database that simulates such a remote API.

We can do this for free with the help of Firebase. Firebase is backed by Google and represents a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), which allows us to build a database very easily. We will use the Realtime Database service from Firebase without using the Firebase Android SDK. Even though such a database is not a proper REST web service, we can use its database URL as a REST endpoint and pretend that that is our REST interface, therefore simulating a real backend.

Note

As we mentioned in the Technical requirements section, make sure that you have an existing Google account or that you create one beforehand.

Let's start creating a database...