gRPC test-and-try with Akka Serverless and Evans

• awesome-grpc

  4 7,253 5.8

  A curated list of useful resources for gRPC

  

Definitely check out Awesome gRPC for tons of great resources, even beyond the tooling like the Evans CLI. Also, if you want to start building gRPC services in a streamlined fashion, without spinning up servers and figuring out deploys and operations, then you should sign-up for an account at Akka Serverless.

• evans

  11 4,115 4.8 Go

  Evans: more expressive universal gRPC client

And who am I kidding? I'm a CLI-type person. Which is why I was super excited to stumble about Evans. Within minutes, I had gone from installation to trying out TLS-secured APIs and microservices running in the cloud on Lightbend's new serverless offering.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• postman-app-support

  279 5,741 2.3

  Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.

  

Given my background in the API management space, and with not so distant memories of Mashery, Apigee and 3scale duking it out with their various flavors of API test consoles (kudos to Apigee for using their console to get ahead in the market!), one would think that I'm a sucker for UI. And yes, I do like the modern take on API test-and-try consoles; Postman being quite a great example. I was excited about their beta announcement for gRPC support! But as I dove into that tool and the other quite excellent API test-and-try tool, Kong's Insomnia, I realized that a critical feature - at least in my opinion - that was missing was server reflection, which allows for dynamic clients to be used; no necessary gathering and loading of various protobuf files. For more simplistic, single proto file implementations, not a problem. But with Akka Serverless, one can start to create rather elaborate gRPC based APIs and microservices, including those that span over event brokers. The protobuf files and structure become more sophisticated, with 3rd party library imports and the like. You can gather up all the protos and sometimes that is indeed needed. But for quick testing, especially by those who aren't gRPC experts, server reflection makes it much easier to get going.

• insomnia

  225 33,067 9.7 JavaScript

  The open-source, cross-platform API client for GraphQL, REST, WebSockets, SSE and gRPC. With Cloud, Local and Git storage.

  

Given my background in the API management space, and with not so distant memories of Mashery, Apigee and 3scale duking it out with their various flavors of API test consoles (kudos to Apigee for using their console to get ahead in the market!), one would think that I'm a sucker for UI. And yes, I do like the modern take on API test-and-try consoles; Postman being quite a great example. I was excited about their beta announcement for gRPC support! But as I dove into that tool and the other quite excellent API test-and-try tool, Kong's Insomnia, I realized that a critical feature - at least in my opinion - that was missing was server reflection, which allows for dynamic clients to be used; no necessary gathering and loading of various protobuf files. For more simplistic, single proto file implementations, not a problem. But with Akka Serverless, one can start to create rather elaborate gRPC based APIs and microservices, including those that span over event brokers. The protobuf files and structure become more sophisticated, with 3rd party library imports and the like. You can gather up all the protos and sometimes that is indeed needed. But for quick testing, especially by those who aren't gRPC experts, server reflection makes it much easier to get going.

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