GRPC: An alternative to the API?

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Google has been getting lots of attention recently with its "GRPC" project: http://www.grpc.io/

Using GRPC, a developer specifies data types and protocol details in an interface definition language (IDL) based on protobuf. Then the developer generates client and server stubs from the IDL, and uses them in the code. Client and server communicate over a sophisticated, bidirectional binary protocol (HTTP/2).

Presumably this is intended to be an alternative to today's APIs, which exchange JSON over HTTP and make do without an IDL. (Yes, they may have a design doc like Swagger but that's different IMHO.)

Is anyone out there using this? Do they see it as a viable alternative to the API? Or is GRPC missing the points that made APIs succeed in the first place?

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alan
Participant III

Actually, I just got an email from the product Manager of gRPC - they'd love add swagger + JSON support into gRPC too. What is true is that gRPC doesn't use REST, it presumes RPC. AWS Lambda also doesn't support REST, and is purely based on RPC as well. I'm not familiar enough with Twitter's Finagle, but at Amazon, the framework used was also similar to gRPC, and leveraged a binary JSON over HTTP.

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@Greg Brail Is GRPC in Apigee's pipeline? Asking this on behalf of an existing customer.