A Different Kind of Networking with gRPC and Protocol Buffers
summary
An Android team replaced REST+JSON with gRPC and Protocol Buffers (proto3) using HTTP/2 and bidirectional streaming for a robo-advisor backend. They generate Java classes and gRPC stubs via the Gradle protobuf plugin, verified Java and Go servers interoperate while Node/Ruby clients had problems, and addressed binary-debugging difficulties by using grpc-gateway for a JSON reverse-proxy and a GCP Cloud Functions + Digdag pipeline to sync .proto files across repositories.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:38RPC basics
- 4:52REST versus RPC design
- 7:47RPC use cases
- 11:34gRPC framework
- 13:41JSON with gRPC
- 16:58gRPC pros and cons
- 19:19Protocol Buffers syntax
- 22:18Java from Protobuf
- 26:17gRPC and Protobuf integration
- 28:53Protobuf pros and cons
- 30:43Android gRPC setup
- 33:58gRPC Java build
- 36:33Writing Protobuf files
- 37:36Android gRPC implementation
- 39:29Protobuf sync in dev
- 41:56Automating Protobuf sync
- 43:47Improving Protobuf sync
- 44:52gRPC versus REST
- 45:36Summary and resources
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