At the Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced additions to the Firebase platform aimed at making it easier for developers to build AI-powered applications in JavaScript/TypeScript, including Go Support will be available soon.
Firebase Genkit is an open source framework using the Apache 2.0 license that allows developers to quickly incorporate AI into new and existing applications.
The Genkit use cases the company highlighted Tuesday include many of the standard generative AI use cases, such as content generation and summarization, text translation, and image generation.
“Powerful, large-scale language models put AI-powered app features within reach, but building and refining these features beyond prototypes is difficult,” said Chris Gill, Google Product Manager. and developer advocate Peter Friese in an announcement Tuesday. “Many of us are still figuring out how to deploy these features at scale into production, understand their performance, and iterate and improve them quickly. Add to that the need to balance stability and stability, and the problem becomes even more difficult. Honestly, anyone could use some help.”
The Firebase team promises that Genkit uses the same approach as the other Firebase toolchains, so developers can get started quickly. Genkit lets you test new features locally and leverage Google's serverless platforms like Cloud Functions for Firebase and Google Cloud Run to deploy applications.
Since Genkit is open source, developers can extend it as needed, but it already supports many third-party open source projects out of the box. This means, for example, that a developer can use the open model via Ollama in addition to his Google's own Gemini model. In addition to Google Cloud Firestore, Genkit also supports vector databases such as Chrome, Pinecone, and his pgvector for PostgreSQL.
“Genkit is also designed to be open to any model, vector store, embedder, evaluator, or other component through its plugin system,” the team writes.
Google also says that Project IDX, Google's next-generation web-based integrated development environment, which is now generally available, will support Genkit's developer UI out of the box.
In addition to Genkit, the Firebase team today also announced support for SQL databases with Firebase Data Connect, a new service powered by Google's Cloud SQL Postgres database.
Also new is Firebase App Hosting. Google describes it as “the next generation of serverless web hosting from Google, purpose-built for server-rendered web apps.” Firebase App Hosting is a serverless web hosting solution that manages everything from building applications, to a CDN for distributing content, to server-side rendering for developers.
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