[hnbroseph]

whenever you hit a json api, that's effectively an RPC call.

for example, if you visit: https://api.github.com/repos/grpc/grpc/issues

you'll get some json back. what happens is the browser resolves "api.github.com" (via DNS) to an IP address, and then opens a socket connection to that address. then, in accordance with the HTTP protocol it executes a "GET" operation (a notion particular to HTTP), and in response the github server will talk to a database or cache and respond with data appropriate to request.

because this sequence of events happens across network boundaries (ie, your browser is talking to something outside your computer), it's often referred to as a "remote" procedure call.

[wanghq]

JSON API != RPC

Also the github api is more RESTful than RPC.