OkHttp VS gRPC

Retrofit in combination with OkHttp for fetching data from server (which hopefully already exists)

OkHttp

Being more familiar with Android development only, I mainly use https://github.com/square/okhttp/tree/master/mockwebserver

Retrofit is the best library that lets you connect to HTTP-based API services from your Android applications. It leverages the OkHttp library’s core functionality, adding a bunch of features to it while eliminating the boilerplate code.

Use Retrofit or anything else that builds on OkHttp. If you do end up needing some features that Cronet supports but OkHttp doesn't (such as HTTP/3), just write an interceptor or use google/cronet-transport-for-okhttp.

Even as of 2022, there are networks out there that have broken/misconfigured IPv6, and there most likely always will be. Some wireless carriers and ISPs support it, but in some cases, people have old or improperly-configured routers and devices. Patchy IPv6 support is less of a problem on iOS and the web these days since those clients have support for dynamically falling back on IPv4 when IPv6 fails. After more research, we realized that Android didn’t have this “dual-stack” IP support, and neither did our preferred networking library, OkHttp. This explained why the content-loading issues only surfaced on Android, and why it took some additional digging to uncover the root cause.

Working with the reddit infrastructure team, we did more testing and built high confidence that this last IPv6 theory was indeed the cause of users’ content-loading problems. We assessed our usage of OkHttp and checked if there were any upcoming plans to improve support. OkHttp did have an open ask for “Happy Eyeballs” #506, but no known plans to implement it. Out of due diligence, we also assessed other network libraries– but knew that moving off OkHttp would be a radical change, indeed. We read the RFC 8305, “Happy Eyeballs algorithm for dual-stack IPv4/IPv6”, and thought “wow, we don’t want to implement this ourselves.” And as we were studying that open OkHttp issue and thinking “If only they would…”

Your app would request data from the backend inside it's domain layer. As the other commenter mentioned, Retrofit is a commonly used library for interfacing with REST APIs, which is built on top of OkHttp (a more generic HTTP client).

OkHttp

I've trialled my new image with an existing project via JLink that's heavy on Netty and gRPC the image works great (with a small tweak to exclude grpc-netty-shaded due to grpc-java#9083).

`proto_library` for building the `.bin` file from protos works great. Generating stubs/messages for "all" languages does not. Each language does not want to implement gRPC rules, the gRPC team does not want to implement rules for each language. Sort of a deadlock situation. For example:

- C++: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/cc_grpc_libra...

- Python: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/python_rules....

- ObjC: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/objc_grpc_lib...

- Java: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/java_grpc_libr...

- Go (different semantics than all of the other): https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/proto/def...

But there's also no real cohesion within the community. The biggest effort to date has been in https://github.com/stackb/rules_proto which integrates with gazelle.

tl;dr: Low alignment results in diverging implementations that are complicated to understand for newcomers. Buff's approach is much more appealing as it's a "this is the one way to do the right thing" and having it just work by detecting `proto_library` and doing all of the linting/registry stuff automagically in CI would be fantastic.

Small clarification (to my understanding, I'm not a Java Guru) on why Java got on top - those Java implementations use something called Direct Executor. It's super performant when there's no chance of a blocking operation. But if you are to do anything more than echo service, you might be in trouble. Other implementations probably don't suffer from the same constraint. The related discussion can be found in this PR.

If you do streaming then the best option would be to use a so called manual flow control. You can find an example here.

Another interesting link is their official grpc-java benchmarks project, which is also used in the benchmark I've posted you.