Exploring the Power of gRPC-Gateway for Writing RESTful Services
Rajiv Ranjan Singh
India 🇮🇳
gRPC Global Meetup
Rajiv Ranjan Singh
Software Engineer @ A.P. Moller - Maersk
I graduated in August, 2022 from JSSATE Bengaluru, India
Agenda
Prerequisites: gRPC, HTTP/JSON, Protobuf
- REST and gRPC
- gRPC-Gateway
- Demonstrating how to use gRPC Gateway
REST and gRPC
gRPC doesn't have a default speed advantage over REST, but it provides features that can help enhance its speed.
- selective message compression
- load balancing
- etc
We all know that gRPC is not a tool for everything. There are cases where we still want to provide a traditional HTTP/JSON API. The reasons can range from maintaining backward compatibility to supporting programming languages or clients not well supported by gRPC. But writing another service just to expose an HTTP/JSON API is quite a time-consuming and tedious task.
The gRPC-Gateway is a plugin of the Google protocol buffers compiler protoc. It reads protobuf service definitions and generates a reverse-proxy server which translates a RESTful HTTP API into gRPC. This server is generated according to the google.api.http annotations in your service definitions.
This helps you provide your APIs in both gRPC and HTTP/JSON format at the same time.
gRPC-Gateway
- A plugin of protobuf compiler
- Generate proxy codes from protobuf
- Translates HTTP JSON Call to gRPC
- In-process translation: only for unary gRPC
- Separate proxy server: both unary and streaming gRPC
gRPC-Gateway
gRPC-Gateway
gRPC-Gateway
Demonstrating how to use gRPC Gateway
- Defining Hello World gRPC service using protocol buffers.
- Creating
main.gowhere we will write our client and server logic. - Adding gRPC-Gateway annotations to an existing proto file.
- Generating the gRPC-Gateway stubs.
References
Thank You, 🙏 🎉
Portfolio: https://iamrajiv.github.io
GitHub: https://github.com/iamrajiv
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamrajivranjansingh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/therajiv