Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation

trpc.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 223 posts

Re: tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation

#21

Post by purkka »

jitl wrote: post #7

We’ve use an API style similar to tRPC at Notion, although our API predated tRPC by 4 years or so. You can build this kind of thing yourself easily using Typescript’s mapped types, by building an object type where the keys are your API names, and the values are { request, response } types. Structure your “server” bits to define each API handler as a function taking APIs[“addUser”][“request”] and returning Promise . T…

In our current project with a TS frontend and Python backend, we use an OpenAPI schema as the source of truth and openapi-typescript-codegen [0] to interface with it on the client side. While not perfect, it provides a very nice interface to our API with request/response typings.

I also wrote a 10-line mock API wrapper that you can call as mockApi((request) => response), and it will type-check that your mock function implements the API correctly and return a function that looks exactly like the real API function.

[0]: https://github.com/ferdikoomen/openapi-typescript-codegen

Re: tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation

#22

Post by jensneuse »

I'm a big fan of tRPC. It's amazing how it pushed TypeScript only stacks to the limit in terms of DX. Additionally, it made the GraphQL community aware of the limitations and tradeoffs of the Query language. At the same time, I think tRPC went through a really fast hype cycle and it doesn't look like we're seeing a massive move away from REST and GraphQL to RPC. That said, we see a lot of interest in RPC these days as we've adopted some ideas from tRPC and the old NextJS. In our BFF framework (https://wundergraph.com/) we've combined file based routing with RPC. In addition to tRPC, we're automatically generating a JSON Schema for each operation and an OpenAPI spec for the whole set of operations. People quite like this approach because you can easily share a set of RPC endpoints as an OpenAPI spec or postman collection. In addition, there are no discussions around HTTP verbs and such, there's only really queries, mutations and subscriptions. I'm curious what other people's experiences are with GraphQL, REST and RPC style APIs? What are you using these days and how many people/teams are involved/using your apis?

Re: tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation

#23

Post by rwieruch »

ianlevesque wrote: post #15
rwieruch wrote: post #9

I have used tRPC for two ~50k loc web applications and love it. The DX is incredible. But I feel like tRPC had its hype time some time ago, so RSC’s hype quickly caught up. These days everyone speaks about whether to use or not to use RSC while there is such a great stable solution like tRPC out there. I am not against RSC, but there is way too much discussion about it. tRPC is a super pragmatic way to create applica…

For what it’s worth I have never heard of RSC and it’s not googleable. Have a link?

React Server Components. Sorry, I edited the comment above.

Re: tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation

#24

Post by jitl »

scriptsmith wrote: post #13
jitl wrote: post #7

We’ve use an API style similar to tRPC at Notion, although our API predated tRPC by 4 years or so. You can build this kind of thing yourself easily using Typescript’s mapped types, by building an object type where the keys are your API names, and the values are { request, response } types. Structure your “server” bits to define each API handler as a function taking APIs[“addUser”][“request”] and returning Promise . T…

Is there some trick to doing validation of request data using this process? That's a valuable part of using something like tRPC, JSON Schema + type generation, zod, etc.

We use an internal validator library that we infer request types from. It’s similar to Zod (but also predates it by a year).

I’ve also spent some time on a Typescript type to X compiler. My first prototype is open source and targets Thrift, Proto3, Python, and JSON schema: https://github.com/justjake/ts-simple-type/tree/main/src/com...

I’m not happy with the design decision in that codebase to try to “simplify” Typescript types before compiling, and probably won’t continue that implementation, but we have a few internal code generators that consume TS types and output test data builders and model clases we use in production.

I want to open source some of those bits but haven’t found the time.

Re: tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation

#26

Post by iansinnott »

purkka wrote: post #21
jitl wrote: post #7

We’ve use an API style similar to tRPC at Notion, although our API predated tRPC by 4 years or so. You can build this kind of thing yourself easily using Typescript’s mapped types, by building an object type where the keys are your API names, and the values are { request, response } types. Structure your “server” bits to define each API handler as a function taking APIs[“addUser”][“request”] and returning Promise . T…

In our current project with a TS frontend and Python backend, we use an OpenAPI schema as the source of truth and openapi-typescript-codegen [0] to interface with it on the client side. While not perfect, it provides a very nice interface to our API with request/response typings. I also wrote a 10-line mock API wrapper that you can call as mockApi ((request) => response), and it will type-check that your mock functio…

Can second this approach. At a past job we did the same, except to connect the frontend to a Go backend.

I really like that the openAPI approach is language agnostic, and makes it relatively simple to support SDKs for many other languages if needed. For any company where the API itself is a product, OpenAPI is great.

Re: tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation

#30

Post by nerdponx »

cyco130 wrote: post #25

If you wanna take the concept up a notch: https://rakkasjs.org/guide/use-server-side-query

> When it runs on the client, variables from the surrounding scope that you use in the server-side function are captured, serialized, and sent to the server. Since anyone can send any request to the server, you have to validate everything that comes from the surrounding scope.

This is mildly horrifying to consider without good tooling support.

Post reply on HN