On: Why We’re Switching to gRPC

[superfreek]

gRPC is great, but my issues with it are debugging and supporting the browser as a first class citizen.

We've been working hard on OpenRPC [0]. An Interface Description for JSON-RPC akin to swagger. It's a good middle ground between the two.

[0] https://open-rpc.org

[apitman → superfreek]

No streaming? I poked through the docs and spec but didn't see it mentioned. Assuming it's just JSON-RPC under the hood that answers my question, but maybe ya'll have added support on top.

[denormalfloat → superfreek]

Have you looked at gRPC-Web?

[huehehue → denormalfloat]

I have mixed feelings about gRPC-Web, and welcome alternatives. Setting up a proxy with any sort of non-standard config can be a pain, gRPC-Web doesn't translate outbound request data for you which can get ugly[0], and your service bindings may or may not try to cast strings to JS number types which silently fail if over MAX_SAFE_INTEGER.

[0] Instead of passing in a plain object, you build it as such:

  const userLookup = new UserLookupRequest();
  const idField = new UserID();
  idField.setValue(29);
  userLookup.setId(idField);
  UserService.findUser(userLookup);

The metadata field doesn't seem to mind though...