twirp VS grpc-web

The next time I want to build an API, I will probably make use of https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp. I like working with Protobuf and having strongly-typed and well-defined messages, but gRPC is way, way too much. It's obviously a Google product, built for what Google needs.

Use Protobuf for messages, but just use HTTP for transport.

- Twirp (Twitch light version of gRPC, with optional JSON encoding, HTTP1 support and without streaming) - https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp

There is another: twirp

And addition to what was mentioned there are also webrpc and twirp.

If you find one, you maybe also interested in twirp.

Twitch has a great framework for it https://twitchtv.github.io/twirp/docs/intro.html

We have better experience with https://goa.design/ than with https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp

Take a look at Twirp (https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp) open sourced by TwitchTv. It's a lot lighter weight than gRPC. It does use Protobufs but addresses some of the concerns you mentioned, such as being able to test with JSON payloads, works over HTTP 1.1 and HTTP/2, good client libraries, and doesn't require a proxy.

They address your concerns in more detail in the Twirp release announcement (2018) - https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2018/01/16/twirp-a-sweet-new-rpc-f...

A proxy is required to communicate from web clients to a server running gRPC, and there are only two choices for this proxy: a. The Improbable gRPC-Web client or b. The Google gRPC-Web client

I'll have to try the Improbable method (https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web) - as it definitely includes a websocket transport, hopefully this multiplexes requests on that transport and would hence solve the problem. I'll post again once I know...

I think you should check out https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web/tree/master/go/grpcwebproxy

What I like with gRPC is that it allows both client and server side streaming. Twirp seems to not have this feature at all. In contrast the https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web even supports server and client streaming while wrapping gRPC in a HTTP1.1 Web connection.

I highly recommend also to look into https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web in contrast to the 'official' gRPC-web from google the improbable-eng Implementation can do both server side and client side gRPC streaming (when used with their JavaScript client library) and all this on an http1.1/websocket basis...

We use https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web for the server part with https://github.com/protobufjs/protobuf.js on the frontend.

I'm debating whether or not to rely on grpc for all client to API transport using improbable-eng's grpc-web project. The hesitation I'm running into is concern over unforeseen pitfalls. The fact that it isn't widely used is the main cause for my apprehension.

If you use https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web you do not need envoy, you can wrap your golang grpc connection. I then mux the grpc and grpc-web so that I can use the same endpoint to serve http1 and http2 clients. This makes it easy to host on the cloud, eg. google cloud run.

I'm setting up a server portion of a website which uses (g)RPC. My dev setup is a docker-compose.yml that starts up my server on 50051 & another service that runs grpcwebproxy (exposes 8080 and proxies to my server @ 50051).