Here are some frequently asked questions. Hope you find your answer in here :-)
gRPC is a modern, open source remote procedure call (RPC) framework that can run anywhere. It enables client and server applications to communicate transparently, and makes it easier to build connected systems.
Read the longer Motivation & Design Principles post for background on why we created gRPC.
gRPC Remote Procedure Calls, of course!
The main usage scenarios:
Google has been using a lot of the underlying technologies and concepts in gRPC for a long time. The current implementation is being used in several of Google’s cloud products and Google externally facing APIs. It is also being used by Square, Netflix, CoreOS, Docker, Cockroachdb, Cisco, Juniper Networks and many other organizations and individuals.
C++, Java, Objective-C, Python, Ruby, Go, C#, Node.js. All of the above mentioned languages are now in GA and follow semantic versioning.
Java implementation supports Android and Objective-C is targeted at iOS and are also at 1.0 now.
You can start with installation of gRPC by following instructions from here. Or head over to the gRPC GitHub org page, pick the runtime or language you are interested in and follow the README instructions.
All implementations are licensed under Apache 2.0.
Contributors are highly welcome and the repositories are hosted on GitHub. We look forward to community feedback, additions and bugs. Both individual contributors and corporate contributors need to sign our CLA. If you have ideas for a project around gRPC, please read guidelines and submit here. We have a growing list of projects under gRPC Ecosystem
Check out the documentation right here on grpc.io.
The roadmap is being tracked in GitHub milestones. Please refer to the respective milestones in the gRPC, gRPC-java and gRPC-go repositories under the GitHub gRPC org.
Not yet. This is an area that's being actively explored and we welcome feedback and contributions. We are collecting names of people interested in early access program here. There is node.js support for server side JavaScript.
Yes. gRPC is designed to be extensible to support multiple content types. The initial release contains support for Protobuf and we welcome contributions to add support for others.
gRPC and Protobuf provide an easy way to precisely define a service and auto generate reliable client libraries for iOS, Android and the servers providing the back end. The clients can take advantage of advanced streaming and connection features which help save bandwidth, do more over fewer TCP connections and save CPU usage and battery life.
This is largely what gRPC is on the wire. However gRPC is also a set of libraries that will provide higher-level features consistently across platforms that common HTTP libraries typically do not. Examples of such features include:
gRPC largely follows HTTP semantics over HTTP/2 but we explicitly allow for full-duplex streaming. We diverge from typical REST conventions as we use static paths for performance reasons during call dispatch as parsing call parameters from paths, query parameters and payload body adds latency and complexity. We have also formalized a set of errors that we believe are more directly applicable to API use cases than the HTTP status codes.
Jee-Arr-Pee-See.