grpc-web VS adama-lang

* Additionally, client can stream data to the backend server (if bidirectional GRPC streams are used). I.e. client sends WebSocket messages, those will be transformed to GRPC messages by WebSocket server and delivered to the application backend.

As a result we have a system which allows to quickly create individual streams by using strict GRPC contract but terminating connections over WebSocket transport. So it works well in web browsers. After that no need to write WebSocket protocol, client implementation, handle WebSocket connection. This all will be solved by a suggested WebSocket server and its client SDKs.

The mechanics is similar to Websocketd (https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd), but instead of creating OS processes we create GRPC streams. The difference from grpc-web (https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web) is that we provide streaming capabilities but not exposing GRPC contract to the client - just allowing to stream any data as payload (both binary and text) with some wrappers from our client SDKs side for managing subscriptions. I.e. it's not native GRPC streams on the client side - we expose just Connection/Subscription object to stream in both directions. GRPC streams used only for communication between WebSocket server and backend. To mention - grpc-web does not support all kinds of streaming now (https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web#streaming-support) while proposed solution can. This all should provide a cross-platform way to quickly write streaming apps due to client SDKs and language-agnostic nature of GRPC.

I personally see both pros and cons in this scheme (without concentrating on both too much here to keep the question short). I spent some time thinking about this myself, already have some working prototypes – but turned out need more opinions before moving forward with the idea and releasing this, kinda lost in doubts.

My main question - whether this seems interesting for someone here? Do you find this useful and see practical value?

By default, web browsers do not support gRPC, but we will use gRPC-web to make it possible.

You just have to use a library implementation for JavaScript https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web

TypeScript support remains an experimental feature of gRPC.

The gRPC-Web protocol supports HTTP/1 and can be used from a browser.

-- grpc-web

gRPC is mainly used in server-to-server communication, but it can also be used in client-to-server communication. gRPC-web is a gRPC implementation for web browsers. It is a JavaScript library that allows you to call gRPC services from a web browser. It supports Unary and Streaming Server API calls.

Since we're using Envoy, there's one more neat trick that we can employ. It turns out that Envoy also support gRPC-Web out of the box, a JavaScript client designed to support gRPC communication from the browser! That means that we can send gRPC messages over HTTP/1.1 as base64 encoded strings or as binary protobufs. Messages will be sent through our proxy and on to our backend service. The advantage of this is smaller and more efficient wire communication which should lead to better performance.

protoc-gen-grpc-web — a plugin that allows our front end to communicate with the backend using gRPC calls. A separate blog post on this coming up in the future.

I'm just a tryhard. However, I've been coding since a child out of a weird love/obsession. Nothing super successful in the public space, but I retired at 40 to spend time building my cathedral: https://www.adama-platform.com/

my history: https://www.adama-platform.com/2024/01/28/euler.html

I'm in the camp of f = ui(state), and the reason for this is the extreme of streaming games where UI = frame buffer. I'm inventing my own framework for radically simplifying traditional Web apps via RxHTML which works great for crud apps. However, games requires more insight into state machines and what-not.

In terms of the logic, I wrote an entire platform to simplify multi-player board games which I'm evolving to tackle various businesses. https://www.adama-platform.com/

For context, I was not raised religious at all and kind of thought a bunch of it was hokum.

But then I did a heroic dose, and I went to the church of engineering where I saw the entire construction of the machines use from the transistor all the way up to the platform I'm building.

My faith is more a faith that humanity is worth it, and I've come to see "The Lord" as an appropriate metaphor for the collective conciseness of several billion people living their lives.

At core, I'm rejecting nihilism as a valid way to live, and I'm writing an essay to outline the way.

In this, I also reject cynicism, and this is because it offers nothing.

The way forward is to embrace the responsibility that comes with great knowledge and to build an organization that helps push technology forward. This is why my platform is open source ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ), and I'm working very hard to get my handful of clients in a good place.

I'll take the bait and provide evidence on why you should write a programming language.

First, it's technically very difficult, but you will gain deeper insight into the art of the craft. So, if you are a TC chaser or career minded person, then spending half a year writing a language will help you master the coding aspect of the game. I've started many languages since I started college, and each one was instructional. (I'm now 40 and an early retiree)

Second, it's fun.

Third, it may turn into something new. If some people don't write a new programming language, then we are stuck with what we have. This advice basically admits that the status quo is good enough.

The authors saying that the language, as a project, is a lifetime appointment? Well, this reveals everything. I believe if you want to do a programming language, then you must be willing to invest at least a decade or two.

So, here, I am at forty preparing to launch a SaaS around a language that I designed ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ). The kicker, I believe, is that a project like this requires wandering the desert alone for quite a while.

I'm preparing to launch, and I just started to load test my shiny new production cluster. Low and behold, it sucks. Fortunately, I have a tremendous number of dashboards and isolated it to how I'm interacting with RDS. I've got my work cut out for me which I'll write about.

However, I have a potentially interesting business precisely because I evolved a language which solved a niche use-case. The number of problems that I have had to solve up to this point is not for the faint of heart. Life and reality are harsh mistress.

So, maybe, yes, you can save yourself some heartache by not writing a language. Perhaps, a better way to think or phase this is "Writing a programming language is a lonely affair that will most likely end in tragedy after a long death march".

I want to make games, but even some years ago I realized it was not a great path for a multitude of reason (many of which are in this article).

My path, and what I recommend, is do something hard and important which pays the bills at a premium. I did infrastructure work, and I was lucky to have a great decade long career allowing me to "retire early".

Now, I can work on a game at my pace building the tools that I see fit. I'm focused on board games because they have a timeless quality about them. I'm developing an entire SaaS platform and programming language to make the network goo beyond easy. http://www.adama-lang.org/

As I'm getting close to some kind of launch for the SaaS, my next thing is to build up my own web based IDE with a release-often ideology such that I can build a Roblox for online 2D board games. Honestly, I'm having a blast because I'm not suffering tools which are going to fade.

I like to call such a list a "wall of shame", and I have my own over here: http://jeffrey.io/wall-of-shame.html

What has helped me over the years is that I view tech as art, and so these projects are only market failures. Your growth as a technologist is manifest, and it's important to see side projects as a form of practice.

If you can move past the failure label and see everything as successful at something, then you feel a whole lot better. A discipline that I have had for decades now is to write a postmortem on why I believe a project is a failure because that crystalizes my learning.

My history helped me excel as a principal engineer which put me towards an early retirement where I can now focus on my ultimate side project: Adama ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ) which I am turning into a new kind of PaaS thing.

Here is the crazy thing: I already know that I'm making several mistakes as I have no customers and no one asking me for anything. This is an exceptionally lonely way to start a project as the OP and others have noted, but I'm enjoying it well enough.

I'm working on http://www.adama-lang.org/ which started as a programming language for board games, and it is turning into a reactive privacy-focused data store for Jamstack.

I hope to launch in coming month an "Early Access" edition.

While I do intend to turn this into a business, I'm primarily focusing on small projects to amuse myself. I'm going to break every rule in the business with my LLC. The #1 company value is sleep.

I actually think this is onto something that I'm finding in a different way. Instead of a massive database, what if we had a key-value store mapping keys to tiny databases.

This is, to some degree, what I'm building over at http://www.adama-lang.org/ without a full SQL engine. Each document has tables, and the tables can be indexed. I have yet to find a usecase (in my domain) which requires joins. HOWEVER, I've had a ton of fun building it and I'm getting ready to start making games.

I do believe it would be amazing to have a key-logger service where a reducer like sqlite/adama could come into collapse the log into a single file.

The closest I see is from the Boki paper ( https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~zjia/boki-sosp21.pdf ) which was presented at SOSP21.

CRDT solve a part of your problem, and an important consideration is whether or not you want off-line editing. If you don't need off-line editing, then a WebSocket can do it.

I'm actually using my project to build a collaborative IDE (designer like Figma): http://www.adama-lang.org/

I'm going to be launching it as a SaaS soon so people can spin up a new back-end without managing an infrastructure.