gRPC is a modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment. It uses HTTP/2 for transport and Protocol Buffers as the interface description language.
gRPC is designed to be:
In this article, we will take a look at how to use gRPC for high-performance communication in backend development.
There are many reasons to use gRPC, but some of the most important ones are:
Using gRPC is simple. The first step is to install the gRPC library for your chosen programming language. Then, you need to define your service in a .proto file using the Protocol Buffers interface description language. Finally, you need to write your code to implement the service.
Let's take a look at a simple example. We will create a service that takes a name and returns a greeting.
First, we need to install the gRPC library for Node.js:
npm install grpc
Next, we need to define our service in a .proto file. We will call our file greet.proto:
syntax = "proto3";
package greet;
service Greeter {
rpc SayHello (HelloRequest) returns (HelloReply) {}
}
message HelloRequest {
string name = 1;
}
message HelloReply {
string message = 1;
}
In this file, we have defined a service called Greeter with a single method called SayHello. This method takes a HelloRequest, which contains a name, and returns a HelloReply, which contains a message.
Finally, we need to write our code to implement the service. We will create a file called greeter_server.js:
var grpc = require('grpc');
var protoLoader = require('@grpc/proto-loader');
var packageDefinition = protoLoader.loadSync(
__dirname + '/greet.proto',
{
keepCase: true,
longs: String,
enums: String,
defaults: true,
oneofs: true
});
var greet_proto = grpc.loadPackageDefinition(packageDefinition).greet;
function sayHello(call, callback) {
callback(null, {message: 'Hello ' + call.request.name});
}
function main() {
var server = new grpc.Server();
server.addService(greet_proto.Greeter.service, {sayHello: sayHello});
server.bind('0.0.0.0:50051', grpc.ServerCredentials.createInsecure());
server.start();
}
main();
In this file, we have imported the grpc and proto-loader libraries. We have loaded our .proto file and defined our SayHello method. Finally, we have created a gRPC server and started it on port 50051.
In this article, we have looked at how to use gRPC for high performance communication in backend development. We have seen how to install the gRPC library, how to define a service in a .proto file, and how to write code to implement the service.