In this five-part tutorial we'll see how we can create a sample React Native app (you might call it a "Hello World" or "boilerplate") that will be capable of receiving Push Notifications using Firebase. Such guide could be a great headstart for React Native beginners, yet also for those intermediate or experienced developers who want to know more about push notifications: how they work, what are their best usage scenarios and how much they can be an improvement for almost any mobile app.
The entire source code shown throughout this tutorial, as well as a working sample app built with it, is available on GitHub under MIT license: if you happen to like it, don't forget to give it a star (and a like to this website)!
For the sake of simplicity this tutorial has been splitted into multiple parts, each one dedicated to a specific sub-topic:
- Part 1 of 5: Understanding Push Notifications, in which we'll try to understand what push notifications actually are and the impact they could have (when used properly) on a typical client-server app.
- Part 2 of 5: Setup React Native and Firebase, where we'll deal with the installation and configuration of our whole development stack: React Native, the Firebase SDK and the Visual Studio Code environment, together with the required settings to get our app ready to work with Android and iOS.
- Part 3 of 5: Configure the Firebase Service, in which we'll create the Firebase Project and configure the Firebase Push Notification Services to ensure that our React Native app will be able to receive push notifications through the Firebase API on any Android and iOS device.
- Part 4 of 5: Design and Test the React Native UI, where we'll test our front-end skills by laying out a React-Native UI in order to make our app actually able to receive push notifications and send HTTP requests to the server to remotely keep track of our actions - and possibly fire subsequent push notifications to other clients.
- Part 5 of 5: Server-Side Handler, in which we'll use ASP.NET Core to create a sample, lightweight web service that will be able to receive HTTP requests issued by the clients and/or feed them with push notifications through the Firebase API.
In this fifth post we'll see how we can create a back-end web service using ASP.NET Core and handle the push notifications from the server-side.
