Documentation on Architecture

[wlingke]

I would be really interested in learning more about your data structure architecture decisions. Such as:

• Why not combine room-messages and room-metadata?
• What is room-users? Is it list of userIDs for each room-id? If so, then see why not combine with the above two nodes as well for a general room node
• Is user-names-online a list of userIDs: boolean?
• With regards to storing the name with each message - what if a user edited his/her name? Is that possible inconsistency something you are willing to allow for faster access (versus having to access '/users/user-id/name'?

In any case, some discussion on the architecture decisions would be great for those of us who are new and trying to learn how to architect an app with firebase!

[prescottprue]

+1. I have been wanting this discussion since Firechat was released!

[danshev]

+1. Would also be helpful with we could see/access the Firebase Graphical Debugger for the Firechat example.

For example, being able to see https://firechat.firebaseio.com directly would help understanding the nitty-gritty of the data structure. It'd be especially helpful to see how the sessioning (specifically the use of sessionId's) behaves in-the-wild.