connect-es VS ts-proto

> 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!

I created it so that I could use `protoc` and `ts-proto` to convert the otel proto files into typescript files.

Re libraries incompatible with certain typescript versions - e.g. protobufjs fix - it’s been my experience that you want to try and only use compilers specific to each library and compile libraries separately. It’s unfortunate but the JS community often tries to run all JS for a project through the same single compiler tool chain, using one global version of the compiler instead of relying on and effectively linking the JS output for each library. Unless you routinely rewrite third-party libraries to match your toolchain’s expectations, you’re going to have a hard time doing that.

For a library that generates code, that’s a special case, as the code it generates must target a particular language version. You have three choices: 1. Upstream a fix as you propose; 2. Side-by-side install both TS 4.6 and TS 4.7 using workspaces or sub-projects and have some of your code compile with 4.6 and then link the results or 3. Find a replacement that is updated to 4.7. For example, https://github.com/stephenh/ts-proto has 4.7 support listed in its readme.

With ts-proto, I can pass a --ts_proto_opt=outputServices=generic-definitions as a flag to protoc to generate "generic service definitions". These definitions contain descriptors for each method, which allows to generate server and client stubs at runtime, and also generate strong types for them at compile time.

Curious to see their typescript implementation and how it compares with https://github.com/stephenh/ts-proto which works great for grpc-web.

I'm planning on modding https://github.com/stephenh/ts-proto to use https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/superstruct on the client.

We also use protobufs and typescript, so we use ts-proto for codegen + binding to grpc services.

Fwiw I maintain ts-proto (https://github.com/stephenh/ts-proto/) and it'd be cool to have the functionality you're building supported in ts-proto at somepoint, if you're curious/want to poke around/etc. :-) Right now there is grpc support via the improbable-eng grpcwebproxy, but supporting GCP's transcoding as well would be great.