Since Parse is shutting down, we are currently using Firebase to support basic data storage and real-time messaging. However, in order to implement a key feature in our app, we need to run some code on a server. The following is what we are trying to accomplish:
We allow users to upload key words to Firebase, then we want to send notifications to them if any new posts that contain these key words were uploaded by other users. For example, userA wants to know if anyone posted information related to chemistry, so userA enters key words "chemistry" and "science" in our app which get stored in Firebase, userB posted an article called "chemistry rocks!" which contains the key word "chemistry", userA will then receive a notification immediately about this post.
We have a couple of solutions in mind, but we are not sure which way to go and how to properly implement these solutions.
1 - Build a server that listens to Firebase changes and also supports sending notifications to individual users. However, to host and maintain a server just to run a search algorithm is just too much work for this simple task.
2 - Store the key words in another database that somehow can send notifications according to the search result. This would be faster because we wouldn't have to connect Firebase server to our own server, but again we would still have to host and maintain a separate server.
I have looked into Google App Engine, their push/pull queue feature sounds like something we want, but does GAE support notifications? And also how can we hook it up with Firebase? We also came across Firebase+Batch to send notifications, but I don't think Batch supports cloud computation.
Has anyone run into this problem? Any solutions?
