Sample gRPC application in Java
Getting started with gRPC on Java
This blog/article is an illustration of simple working example of gRPC in java.
First of all what’s the challenge we are going to solve using gRPC?
One of the biggest challenges in microservice industry is inter-services communication between different microservices. To initiate communication, general purpose protocol used by developers is REST and it has its own challenges. gRPC works on specific payload when sending data and tightly packing of protocol buffers and use of HTTP/2 which is 10 times faster than REST when sending data for this specific payload.
HTTP is stateless meaning it doesn’t relate with the previous requests.
- Headers are sent in request
- Carries info like cookie
- Cannot be compressed
- Plaintext- relatively large
gRPC uses Http/2 and helps to avoid the use of WebSocket as it eliminates the restrictions that existed in HTTP. It enhances performance over HTTP by reducing latency through full request and response and minimizing protocol overhead via compression of header files.
Strong points:
- Switch from JSON to protocol buffers, data is transmitted as fast as possible.
- Multiplexing many requests on one connection so that multiple requests do not block each other
- Full-duplex bi-directional streaming
- Due to binary data format, messages are very light weight.
- Built in code generation in diff programming languages
Limitations:
- Limited browser support, a gRPC service cannot be called from browser
- Binary message-format is not human readable
- Not best fit for broadcasting real-time communication
Sample gRPC application in Java:
