Handling geocoding in Firebase?

Question

Has anyone tried storing and/or searching on geocodes (e.g. lat/long) in Firebase? This is functionality that is built into MongoDB and as I'm considering using Firebase for our backend instead, I need to know how I'd handle this scenario in Firebase.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The folks at Firebase recently open-sourced a library that allows you to store and query location data in Firebase. In short, this is very easily accomplished because all keys in Firebase are strings, and Firebase has support for startAt() and endAt() queries that allow you to do the appropriate windowing for geohashes and bounding boxes.

For implementation details and usage, check out the live demos, source code, and their blog post on GeoFire.