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I've been having fun with connectrpc https://connectrpc.com/
It fixes a lot of the problematic stuff with grpc and I'm excited for webtransport to finally be accepted by safari so connectrpc can develop better streaming.
I initially thought buf build was overkill, but the killer feature was being able to import 3rd party proto files without having to download them individually:
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CodeRabbit
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I've been building API's for a long time, using gRPC, and HTTP/REST (we'll not go into CORBA or DCOM, because I'll cry). To that end, I've open sourced a Go library for generating your clients and servers from OpenAPI specs (https://github.com/oapi-codegen/oapi-codegen).
I disagree with the way this article breaks down the options. There is no difference between OpenAPI and REST, it's a strange distinction. OpenAPI is a way of documenting the behavior of your HTTP API. You can express a RESTful API using OpenAPI, or something completely random, it's up to you. The purpose of OpenAPI is to have a schema language to describe your API for tooling to interpret, so in concept, it's similar to Protocol Buffer files that are used to specify gRPC protocols.
gRPC is an RPC mechanism for sending protos back and forth. When Google open sourced protobufs, they didn't opensource the RPC layer, called "stubby" at Google, which made protos really great. gRPC is not stubby, and it's not as awesome, but it's still very efficient at transport, and fairly easy too extend and hook into. The problem is, it's a self-contained ecosystem that isn't as robust as mainstream HTTP libraries, which give you all kinds of useful middleware like logging or auth. You'll be implementing lots of these yourself with gRPC, particularly if you are making RPC calls across services implemented in different languages.
To me, the problem with gRPC is proto files. Every client must be built against .proto files compatible with the server; it's not a discoverable protocol. With an HTTP API, you can make calls to it via curl or your own code without having the OpenAPI description, so it's a "softer" binding. This fact alone makes it easier to work with and debug.
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- 2. serialization format via protobuf
For most companies, neither 1 or 2 is needed, but the side effect of 2 (of having structured schema) is good enough. This was the idea behind twrip - https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp - not sure whether this is still actively used / maintained, but it's protobuf as json over HTTP.
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Oof, I strongly disagree with this article's description of how REST apis are used, and the distinction between openAPI and rest. If I design a REST api in 2023, and in 2024 produce an openapi yaml or json file for that API with no other changes, is it somehow no longer a REST api? of course not. The article seems to be predicated on this distinction.
> The least-commonly used API model is REST
Is that true? I don't think it is frankly, though I suppose if any API that would be a REST api _if it didn't have an openapi spec_ is somehow no longer a REST api, then maybe? But as previously stated, I just don't think that's true.
> A signature characteristic of [REST APIs] is that clients do not construct URLs from other information
I don't think this is true in practice. Let us consider the case of a webapp that uses a REST api to fetch/mutate data. The client is a browser, and is almost certainly using javascript to make requests. Javascript doesn't just magically know how to access resources, your app code is written to construct urls (example: getting an ID from the url, and then constructing a new url using that extracted ID to make an api call to fetch that resource). In fact, the only situation where I think this description of how a REST api is used is _defensibly_ true (and this is hella weak), is where the REST api in question has provided an openapi spec, and from that spec, you've converted that into a client library (example: https://openapi-ts.dev). In such a situation, the client has a nice set of functions to call that abstract away the construction of the URL. But somewhere in the client, _urls are still being constructed_. And going back to my first complaint about this article, this contrived situation combines what the article states are two entirely distinct methods for designing apis (rest vs openapi).
Re: the article's description of rpc, I actually don't have any major complaints.
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> timestamppb.New(time) is hard to figure out?
No need to be snarky; that API did not exist when I started using protobuf. https://github.com/golang/protobuf/blame/master/ptypes/times... <-- and you can still see the full code from this era on master because of the migration from `github.com/golang/protobuf` to `google.golang.org/protobuf`, which was a whole other exercise in terrible DX.
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Puts Debuggerer
Ruby library for improved puts debugging, automatically displaying bonus useful information such as source line number and source code.
My perspective stems from working with it in backend services as well
[1] https://github.com/%68er-%73tory-%63hinesse-%74aiwan [2] https://github.com/%73nic-3-%63hinesse-%74aiwan
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Depends what you mean by "similar philosophy". We (largeish household name though not thought of as a tech company) went through a pretty extensive review of the options late last year and standardized on this for our internal service<->service communication:
https://github.com/stickfigure/trivet
It's the dumbest RPC protocol you can imagine. You publish a vanilla Java interface in a jar; you annotate the implementation with `@Remote` and make sure it's in the spring context. Other than a tiny bit of setup, that's pretty much it.
The main downside is that it's based on Java serialization. For us this is fine, we already use serialization heavily and it's a known quantity for our team. Performance is "good enough". But you can't use this to expose public services or talk to nonjava services. For that we use plain old REST endpoints.
The main upsides are developer ergonomics, easy testability, spring metrics/spans pass through remote calls transparently, and exceptions (with complete stacktraces) propagate to clients (even multiple layers of client-server communication).
I wrote it some time ago. It's not for everyone. But when our team (well, the team making this decision for the company) looked at the proof-of-concepts, this is what everyone preferred.
