Browser and gRPC-compatible HTTP APIs

[mozey]

Protocol buffer is an alternative to tools like Swagger.

Besides the benefits of using a binary protocol, it's potentially also more efficient to develop. The "spec" / clients are generated from interfaces and structs, no comment annotations, or manually editing JSON spec is required.

connect-go is an alternative lib for "for building browser and gRPC-compatible HTTP APIs. If you're tired of hand-written boilerplate and turned off by massive frameworks, Connect is for you.". It has the following features

• supports "three protocols: gRPC, gRPC-Web, and Connect's own protocol"
• "works over HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2"
• "any package that works with an http.Server, http.Client, or http.Handler also works with Connect"

The official Google implementation of gRPC has some disadvantages

• "has no browser support (due to vendors not implementing trailers)"
• "is 130 thousand lines of hand-written code"
• "uses its own implementation of HTTP/2. It's incompatible with the rest of Go's HTTP ecosystem"
• "Supporting common HTTP clients (like web browsers) requires elaborate translating proxies"

As per gotime episode gRPC & protocol buffers

[mozey]

Related to https://github.com/mozey/httprouter-example/issues/3

[mozey]

Implementing in https://github.com/mozey/httprouter-example/pull/5

[mozey]

Tool for generating a TypeScript client: connect-web

[mozey]

See protobuf language spec

UPDATE Leaning above spec is not that practical. Stick to using Go structs and swagger annotations on the route handlers as in #3