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gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

spatialos.improbable.io

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Re: gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

#31

Post by JayOtter »

lyschoening wrote: post #21
grw_ wrote: post #7

The reference implementation of gRPC on github[0] has 998 open issues and 215 open pull requests. Every time I've tried to use this package I have encountered a previously-reported issue which has remained unfixed for months. If you need to interact with Google platform it's hard to avoid using gRPC, since many "official" libraries seem to be migrating towards this library, while it remains fragile and bug-ridden. My…

It is worth pointing out that the Python implementation is particularly bad. Perhaps gRPC is really pleasant to use with Java and Go, but the Python implementation is neither usable nor stable enough for it to be worth considering its use for one's own services.

My instinct would be that it'll be just inherently nicer to use in a statically-typed language.

Re: gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

#33

Post by mwitkow »

lyschoening wrote: post #21
grw_ wrote: post #7

The reference implementation of gRPC on github[0] has 998 open issues and 215 open pull requests. Every time I've tried to use this package I have encountered a previously-reported issue which has remained unfixed for months. If you need to interact with Google platform it's hard to avoid using gRPC, since many "official" libraries seem to be migrating towards this library, while it remains fragile and bug-ridden. My…

It is worth pointing out that the Python implementation is particularly bad. Perhaps gRPC is really pleasant to use with Java and Go, but the Python implementation is neither usable nor stable enough for it to be worth considering its use for one's own services.

We haven't tried using gRPC in Python, as we have completely migrated from Python away towards Go.

Our experience of using gRPC in Java, C++ and Golang is pretty good. While it had some initial teething issues (when it was first released), the libraries have generally been a non-issue since the gRPC General Availability (GA-1.0 version).

If you're considering using it in Go, check out the https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/go-grpc-middleware helper libraries that we've contributed back to gRPC Ecosystem.

Re: gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

#34

Post by decwakeboarder »

andrewingram wrote: post #6

I first saw this one a few weeks ago, and have been trying to weigh up its pros and cons over GraphQL (my tool of choice). gRPC-Web: * Speaks protocol buffers, a fast and compact format compared to JSON * Allows clients to use the same APIs as backend services. GraphQL: * Enables a client-centric view of the system. I have abstractions in my GraphQL server that only make sense to clients. It's a query-centric impleme…

> Speaks protocol buffers, a fast and compact format compared to JSON

This is definitely important at Google-scale, but for the rest of us compressed JSON typically isn't that bad.

Re: gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

#36

Post by TimMeade »

Just saw this during the morning reading. Without a deep dive, this looks very promising. We have recently been moving to k8s and grpc for our node work and the last piece was how to get to the browser. If this ties it all as one straight protocol from db to browser it will be very welcome and could not have come at a better time. We were evaluating the alternative (GraphQL etc) but our experiences with node and grpc have been excellent so far.

Immediate evaluation planned.

Re: gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

#38

Post by mwitkow »

mvitorino wrote: post #24
cshenton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gRPC generates rpc server and client stubs based off a protocol buffer definition. Saying it's a replacement for REST makes little sense since it's possible to define a REST API within it. It's also possible to write a totally not RESTful API in a modern http api framework. In fact that's what Google's API design guide does. Encourages RESTful API design then describes how to implement them using proto and gRPC. The…

Interesting! When I first looked at gRPC I missed the option(google.api.http). Are you aware of the reason why REST mapped gRPC is not possible in GAE (http 1 only on the server end of our code)?

There's actually a stand-alone proxy that translates the REST mappings of `google.api.http` into gRPC requests. It relies on code-generation: https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway

This has been the way we've been shipping our REST services until now, but the need to recompile the proxy was a major hinderence to our development speed. Hence gRPC-Web implementation.

Re: gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

#39

Post by lvh »

lstroud wrote: post #26

Stub generation? Remote access protocols? CORBA all over again? So, now I know the next big thing. Portable distributed objects. :-P

CORBA tried to make remote calls look local. Making them look remote (and potentially even making some local calls look remote) is a very different design principle that leaks through almost every bit of the standard, and definitely leaks through to every bit of the implementation.

Re: gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

#40

Post by ddorian43 »

rco8786 wrote: post #29
andrewingram wrote: post #6

I first saw this one a few weeks ago, and have been trying to weigh up its pros and cons over GraphQL (my tool of choice). gRPC-Web: * Speaks protocol buffers, a fast and compact format compared to JSON * Allows clients to use the same APIs as backend services. GraphQL: * Enables a client-centric view of the system. I have abstractions in my GraphQL server that only make sense to clients. It's a query-centric impleme…

does graphql come with its own serialization protocol? I would have thought that the comparison of gRPC to GraphQL is apples/oranges.

it uses json ? so you compare it to that
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