chrisfrew.in VS grpc-web

https://chrisfrew.in

I try to focus on software and everything I've encountered through projects throughout my software career, but often a general post about thoughts on life / software in general sneak in here & there.

My goal is always to share real world examples and code snippets, instead of the 1,000th iteration of the todo app.

If you check out the repo for my blog, you'll see that I have a folder with each snippet actually as a normal code file in it's own language (.py for python, .cs for C#, .ts for TypeScript, and so on). As we'll see by the end of this post, I actually import each of these files as a raw string and then syntax highlight them using the prism-react-renderer library.

A proxy is required to communicate from web clients to a server running gRPC, and there are only two choices for this proxy: a. The Improbable gRPC-Web client or b. The Google gRPC-Web client

I'll have to try the Improbable method (https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web) - as it definitely includes a websocket transport, hopefully this multiplexes requests on that transport and would hence solve the problem. I'll post again once I know...

I think you should check out https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web/tree/master/go/grpcwebproxy

What I like with gRPC is that it allows both client and server side streaming. Twirp seems to not have this feature at all. In contrast the https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web even supports server and client streaming while wrapping gRPC in a HTTP1.1 Web connection.

I highly recommend also to look into https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web in contrast to the 'official' gRPC-web from google the improbable-eng Implementation can do both server side and client side gRPC streaming (when used with their JavaScript client library) and all this on an http1.1/websocket basis...

We use https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web for the server part with https://github.com/protobufjs/protobuf.js on the frontend.

I'm debating whether or not to rely on grpc for all client to API transport using improbable-eng's grpc-web project. The hesitation I'm running into is concern over unforeseen pitfalls. The fact that it isn't widely used is the main cause for my apprehension.

If you use https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web you do not need envoy, you can wrap your golang grpc connection. I then mux the grpc and grpc-web so that I can use the same endpoint to serve http1 and http2 clients. This makes it easy to host on the cloud, eg. google cloud run.

I'm setting up a server portion of a website which uses (g)RPC. My dev setup is a docker-compose.yml that starts up my server on 50051 & another service that runs grpcwebproxy (exposes 8080 and proxies to my server @ 50051).