swagger-tools VS grpc-gateway

The above referenced PoC service based on express uses https://github.com/apigee-127/swagger-tools which surfaces a web app by which front end devs navigate through the published API endpoints. They can use the web app to call the service via the endpoint or copy and paste sample code that calls the service. Most open api integrations support this kind of functionality.

it lacks flexibility but i really enjoy grpc-gateway for 99% of my work

https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway

gRPC Gateway is a protoc plugin that reads gRPC service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful JSON API into gRPC.

I don't have any example that's public atm, but the guide in grpc-gateway is pretty clear/can be followed step by step.

https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway

To integrate with Fiber, I used the Fiber Adaptor (also pretty straightforward): https://docs.gofiber.io/api/middleware/adaptor

I wonder if they would be happy with something like this: https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway

Protobuf is used is massively scaled services like firebase. But you'll still see JSON in streamed realtime services like AWS Kinesis. Hopefully google had a return on investment for creating and using this protocol, but it's not hard to prove that it's far from essential. Out of apparent convenience I use grpc-gateway so I can expose both Protobuf and JSON, but honestly I wouldn't do it again

GRPC is an alternative to rest, rest and GRPC both use the http protocol. But you won’t be able to use fetch to call a GRPC endpoint, you should look into setting up a GRPC proxy within the application(hopping you have access to the source code) grpc-gateway. If you don’t have access you’ll have to create a new container that proxies the calls

(There is an option called google.api.http, that lets you set up a URL that can be used to make HTTP/1 REST requests, which get translated to gRPC calls if you're using grpc-gateway as a proxy in front of your service. That has nothing to do with the requests that are made by gRPC clients and servers themselves.)

Have you looked at https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway ?

protoc-gen-grpc-gateway — plugin for creating a gRPC REST API gateway. It allows gRPC endpoints as REST API endpoints and performs the translation from JSON to proto. Basically, you define a gRPC service with some custom annotations and it makes those gRPC methods accessible via REST using JSON requests.