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grpc-vs-rest
Demo projects for the "gRPC vs REST" session at Hacking With The Homies Developers Conference 2023.
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Let's take a look at some sample projects that demonstrate the distinctions between the REST and gRPC architectural styles. All of the projects we'll examine are implemented as a full-stack address book apps with a simple front-end UI built on Svelte and a NodeJS back-end API. You can find the sample project monorepos on GitHub at anthonydmays/grpc-vs-rest.
The second big difference is that we now have auto-generated client and server stubs. For this task, I chose to use buf and the protobuf-ts plugin in order to generate idiomatic Typescript classes and objects. Not only do these classes describe the types we'll use in the server and client, but also includes the actual gRPC implementations used to serialize and send messages back and forth across the wire.
The second big difference is that we now have auto-generated client and server stubs. For this task, I chose to use buf and the protobuf-ts plugin in order to generate idiomatic Typescript classes and objects. Not only do these classes describe the types we'll use in the server and client, but also includes the actual gRPC implementations used to serialize and send messages back and forth across the wire.
There is one more significant change to note. What might not be obvious is that the gRPC client code is required to run server-side (note that the load function for the main page is named +page.server.ts to denote a server-side rendered page). That's because the base gRPC client library for JavaScript (grpc/grpc-node) used by protobuf-ts need to run on NodeJS.
All the required changes can be viewed in our last demo, the grpc-rest-app implementation. First, we need to update our proto service interface to help the proxy service make our gRPC service methods available at the right URLs and for the correct HTTP operations. To do this, the Google API HTTP library provides annotations we can add to our proto to describe the correct mappings. The buf tool allows us to include the googleapis dependency as a plugin in our buf.yaml file).
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.