connect-es VS esbuild

> However, it's important to note that browser support wasn't a primary focus in gRPC's design. This oversight necessitates an additional component, grpc-web, for browser accessibility. Furthermore, external services often have specific needs like caching and load balancing, which are not directly catered to by gRPC. Adopting gRPC for external services might require bespoke solutions to support these features.

The article should mention the Connect protocol for web-based Protobuf messaging:

https://connectrpc.com/

We can solve this with a service! Now there are many ways I could have started, but I decided to test out gRPC along the way. This was a mistake. I hoped for the best, but gRPC ended up not being a good choice for the web client. Why? you ask. The gRPC protocol works with all the bells and whistles of http when used server to server, but web clients are not as great. The Javascript client is dependent on http 2.0, and it requires a proxy like Envoy to work with a browser. What's more, I didn't love the structure of the generated web client. So through the process of working on this 'local first stack' I actually got sucked in to a big rabbit hole in making the rpc system work. I ended up going with Connect which is a tool that can create a service from a protobuf service definition, that also talks a simple http 1.1 protocol. What ultimately sold me on this solution as the best is that it also came with a very nice to use web client generation, and even plugs in to my favorite react http helper useQuery.

Our stack at Escape is written in multiple languages because each team has specific needs. We use TypeScript for its vibrant ecosystem, Python for cybersecurity research and Go for performance-sensitive tasks. To orchestrate cross-language task orchestration, we first developed a simple request-response protocol over HTTP, but it wasn't sustainable as the Escape codebase grew rapidly. We evaluated several technologies to replace our homegrown protocol, and two emerged as the most promising options: Connect and Temporal. The title gives it away, but the reason is far from obvious

protobuf messages we’ll configure (@bufbuild/connect-es)

try https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-web

As for better gRPC-web, you might want to look into connect-web https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-web

They already have! Connect (https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-web) is what you're looking for, as it's grpc-web compatible.

Ye, fwiw there is an example code size comparison here:

https://github.com/bufbuild/connect-web/blob/main/packages/c...

I'm sure someone will chime in on the implementation details, but hopefully others can give it a try with their projects!

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.