grpc-web VS gRPC

* 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.

gRPC, built on HTTP/2, inherently supports flow control. The server can push updates, but it must also respect flow control signals from the client, ensuring that it doesn't send data faster than what the client can handle.

Yes, grpc_cli tool uses essentially the same mechanism except implemented as a grpc service rather than as a stubby service. The basic principle of both is implementing the C++ proto library's DescriptorDatabase interface with cached recursive queries of (usually) the server's compiled in FileDescriptorProtos.

See also https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/server-reflecti...

The primary difference between what grpc does and what stubby does is that grpc uses a stream to ensure that the reflection requests all go to the same server to avoid incompatible version skew and duplicate proto transmissions. With that said, in practice version skew is rarely a problem for grpc_cli style "issue a single RPC" usecases: even if requests do go to two or more different versions of a binary that might have incompatible proto graphs, it is very common for the request and response and RPC to all be in the same proto file so you only need to make one RPC in the first place unless you're using an extension mechanism like proto2 extensions or google.protobuf.Any.

While gRPC and Apache Thrift have served the microservice architecture well, CloudWeGo's advanced features and performance metrics set it apart as a promising open source solution for the future.

The loadBalancingConfig is what we use in order to decide which policy to go for (round_robin in this case). This JSON representation is based on a protobuf message, then why does the name resolver returns it in the JSON format? The main reason is that loadBalancingConfig is a oneof field inside the proto message and so it can not contain values unknown to the gRPC if used in the proto format. The JSON representation does not have this requirement so we can use a custom loadBalancingConfig .

The Dart implementation of gRPC which puts mobile and HTTP/2 first. It's built and maintained by the Dart team. gRPC is a high-performance RPC (remote procedure call) framework that is optimized for efficient data transfer.

gRPC is a high-performance, open-source RPC (Remote Procedure Call) framework initially developed by Google. It uses Protocol Buffers for serialization and supports bidirectional streaming.

In general, tunneling through HTTP2 turns out to be a great choice. There is a RPC protocol built on top of HTTP2: gRPC[1].

This is because HTTP2 is great at exploiting a TCP connection to transmit and receive multiple data structures concurrently - multiplexing.

There may not be a reason to use HTTP3 however, as QUIC already provides multiplexing.

I expect that in the future most communications will be over encrypted HTTP2 and QUIC simply because middleware creators can not resist to discriminate.

[1] <https://grpc.io>

Even in the https://grpc.io blog says this

gRPC