Can I work with my database or other approaches for real-time annotation instead of firebase?

Hi there!

Yes, this is definitely possible. We have made collaboration systems using all types of databases.

You can follow the same concepts as the firebase example except just use our own database. We have a sample using SQLite here. Note that this sample is using PDFTron WebViewer, but all the concepts and code still apply to PDF.js Express.

Please let me know if you need any further assistance,

Thanks,
Logan