gRPC: From service definition to wire format
kreya.appI like the idea of grpc because I wanted the contract but I tried it on a small service and I think I would avoid it in the future. Too many rough edges and features I didnt really need. I was using it in Rust and python mainly (maybe it is better in Go?) but it had a whole bunch of google stuff in there I didnt need.
- Configuring the python client with a json string that did not seem to have a documented schema
- Error types that were overly general in some ways and overly specific in other ways
- HAProxy couldn't easily health check the service
There were a few others that I cant remember because it was ~5 years ago. I liked the idea of the contract and protobuf seemed easy to write but had no need for client side dns load balancing and the like and was not working in GoLang.
I've only enjoyed using Protobuf + gRPC after we've started using https://buf.build. Before that it was always a pain with Makefiles building obscure commands, then developers having different versions of the Protobuf compiler installed and all kinds of paper cuts like that.
Now it's just "buf generate", every developer has the exact same settings defined in the repo and on the frontend side we are just importing the generated Typescript client and have all the types instantly available there. Also nice to have a hosted documentation to link people to.
My experience is mostly with Go, Python and TS.
I think connect-rpc[0] strikes a good balance between normal http apis, and gRPC. It allows protobuf as json. So you could think of it as an opinionated http api spec. A health check would be just a call to an url /something.v1.MyService/MyMethod -d { "input": "something }.
it works really well, and the tooling is pretty good, though it isn't that widely supported yet. Rust for one doesn't have an implementation. But I've been using it at work, and we basically haven't had any issues with it (go and typescript).
But the good thing is that it can interoperate with normal grpc servers, etc. But that of course locks it into using the protobuf wireformat, which is part of the trouble ;)