gRPC-Web: Moving past REST+JSON towards type-safe Web APIs

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Michal Witkowski and Marcus Longmuir wrote blog post on their experiece with gRPC in order to create type safe web APIs.

This blog post presents how Improbable expanded use of gRPC, the lingua franca for their microservice and client libraries, towards use in browser Web Apps. They also show how this move, together with their adoption of TypeScript in order to end up in type-safe Web App Nirvana.

Article explains what gRPC is and why they decided to use it. gRPC is the next-generation of Google’s in-house RPC library based on the HTTP2 protocol with support for code-generating clients and server stubs in multiple languages. At the same time they leveraged backwards and forwards compatibility of protocol buffers - language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols.

In depth article with details how their usage of gRPC extened: they first used gRPC REST Gateway for using gRPC from the browser, later hacked modern browser to communicate via binary protocol buffers.

Code examples and links to open sourced repositoy included.

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Tags microservices restful apis