gRPC test-and-try with Akka Serverless and Evans

1

PubNub

I first learned about gRPC about five years go. Since that moment in time when an engineer at PubNub introduced me to the framework, I have let the idea of gRPC simmer more in the background, especially since I was already rather steeped in REST, Open API, Swagger, and other sundries seen in the broader API space (miss you, Mashery. There seemed to be plenty of great tooling, documentation and technologies supporting "traditional" API development. Why break new ground and learn something new?

#Mobile Push Messaging #Cloud Infrastructure #Mobile App Tools 1 social mentions

2

Insomnia REST

Given my background in the API management space, and with not so distant memories of Mashery, Apigee and 3scale duking it out with their various flavors of API test consoles (kudos to Apigee for using their console to get ahead in the market!), one would think that I'm a sucker for UI. And yes, I do like the modern take on API test-and-try consoles; Postman being quite a great example. I was excited about their beta announcement for gRPC support! But as I dove into that tool and the other quite excellent API test-and-try tool, Kong's Insomnia, I realized that a critical feature - at least in my opinion - that was missing was server reflection, which allows for dynamic clients to be used; no necessary gathering and loading of various protobuf files. For more simplistic, single proto file implementations, not a problem. But with Akka Serverless, one can start to create rather elaborate gRPC based APIs and microservices, including those that span over event brokers. The protobuf files and structure become more sophisticated, with 3rd party library imports and the like. You can gather up all the protos and sometimes that is indeed needed. But for quick testing, especially by those who aren't gRPC experts, server reflection makes it much easier to get going.

#API Tools #API #Developer Tools 120 social mentions