grpc-web
Centrifugo
Our great sponsors
grpc-web | Centrifugo | |
---|---|---|
33 | 31 | |
8,301 | 7,914 | |
1.2% | 2.4% | |
6.5 | 9.0 | |
11 days ago | 3 days ago | |
JavaScript | Go | |
Apache License 2.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
grpc-web
-
Ask HN: WebSocket server transforming channel subscriptions to gRPC streams
* 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?
-
Build and Deploy a gRPC-Web App Using Rust Tonic and React
By default, web browsers do not support gRPC, but we will use gRPC-web to make it possible.
-
Lemmy v0.18.0 Release - A reddit alternative written in Rust.
You just have to use a library implementation for JavaScript https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web
-
Full Stack Forays with Go and gRPC
TypeScript support remains an experimental feature of gRPC.
- Seeking Opinion: Choosing Between Gateway and Envoy Proxy for Our Microservices Architecture
-
Introducing Tempo: low latency, cross-platform, end-to-end typesafe APIs
The gRPC-Web protocol supports HTTP/1 and can be used from a browser.
-
gRPC on the client side
-- grpc-web
-
Introduction to gRPC
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.
-
gRPC vs REST: Comparing API Styles in Practice
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.
-
Understanding gRPC Concepts, Use Cases & Best Practices
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.
Centrifugo
-
WebSockets vs. Server-Sent-Events vs. Long-Polling vs. WebRTC vs. WebTransport
Hello, I am author of https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo. Our users can choose from WebSocket, EventSource, WebTransport (experimental stabilize in the future). WebRTC is out of scope as the main purpose is central server based real-time json/binary messaging, and WebRTC makes things much more complex since it shines for peer-to-peer and rich media communications.
What I'd like to add is that Centrifugo also supports HTTP-streaming – not mentioned by the OP – but this is a transport which has advantages over Eventsource - like possibility to send POST body on initial request from web browser (with SSE you can not), it supports binary, and with Readable Streams browser API it's widely supported by modern browsers.
Another thing I'd like to mention about Centrifugo - it supports bidirectional WebSocket fallbacks with EventSource and HTTP-streaming, and does this without sticky sessions requirement. I guess nobody else have this at this point. See https://centrifugal.dev/blog/2022/07/19/centrifugo-v4-releas.... Which solves one more practical concern. Sticky sessions is an optimization in Centrifugo case, not a requirement.
If you are interested in topic, we also have a post about WebSocket scalability - https://centrifugal.dev/blog/2020/11/12/scaling-websocket - it covers some design decisions made in Centrifugo.
- Centrifugo v5.1.0 released, with new powers for real-time messaging tasks, now with proxy GRPC subscription streams – similar to WebSocketd but over the network
-
Integrating websockets into my current app
Check out https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo - it was initially designed to be a standalone language-agnostic real-time messaging server. So it may be used with Django without radical change in the existing application and using ASGI. It can also provide a much better performance if you care about it.
- Millions of Active WebSockets with Node.js
-
Show HN: DriftDB is an open source WebSocket back end for real-time apps
https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo
It's a complete solution, including server, admin panel and client library.
We're an European company and use OVH, Hetzner and others.
-
Laravel Websockets vs Soketi vs Laravel Echo Server
Hello! Theoretically you can take a look at https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo - which is a standalone self-hosted real-time messaging server. It does not have native support for Laravel and not compatible with Pusher protocol, though integrating with any backend system, including Laravel: see the blog post https://centrifugal.dev/blog/2021/12/14/laravel-multi-room-chat-tutorial, also has some helper packages:
-
Is Python a good option to implement Websockets?
Hello, it's also possible to design an app in a way that its core will be built with Python, but WebSocket part delegated to something external and efficient like https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo – the benefit of the approach is that application business logic is completely decoupled from the real-time transport layer. This may lead to a scalable design with graceful degradation. I think this is especially useful when you already have backend built with Django and need to handle millions of concurrent connections.
- Centrifugo – real-time messaging server (WebSocket, etc.) which scales well and integrates with any backend. SDKs for browser and mobile development included
-
What is the coolest Go open source projects you have seen?
Centrifugo https://centrifugal.dev/ https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo
- Golang updating the front-end with almost real-time events from the backend server
What are some alternatives?
ngx-grpc - Angular gRPC framework
Socket.io - Realtime application framework (Node.JS server)
grpc-over-webrtc - gRPC over WebRTC
NATS - Golang client for NATS, the cloud native messaging system.
grpcurl - Like cURL, but for gRPC: Command-line tool for interacting with gRPC servers
Confluent Kafka Golang Client - Confluent's Apache Kafka Golang client
buf - The best way of working with Protocol Buffers.
Mercure - 🪽 An open, easy, fast, reliable and battery-efficient solution for real-time communications
webrpc - webrpc is a schema-driven approach to writing backend services for modern Web apps and networks
laravel-websockets - Websockets for Laravel. Done right.
evans - Evans: more expressive universal gRPC client
soketi - Next-gen, Pusher-compatible, open-source WebSockets server. Simple, fast, and resilient. 📣