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by hot_gril 763 days ago
I've never used protobufs with web, but I don't see why not. gRPC, on the other hand, requires HTTP/2 which can be a luxury. I remember making a side project that uses gRPC a while ago and trying to deploy on GCP AppEngine, only to find out it doesn't support gRPC.
2 comments
rco8786 763 days ago
> I've never used protobufs with web, but I don't see why not

We have a bunch of apis like this where I work. It's a huge pain, tbh. You lose the ability to just curl endpoints, or to see what data came over the wire for debugging, not to mention having to use esoteric client libs because every off-the-shelf one just assumes json over http.

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dilyevsky 763 days ago
well if you can't use gRPC which, as you correctly notes, is protocol-incompatible with browser APIs, you kinda need to roll your own RPC framework. Various attempts had been made at this - see connectrpc, for example, by the same company that authored this post. imo, big advantage of protobuf/gRPC ecosystem is that Google is doing all the heavy lifting for you, so unless something else catches on with wider community it's going to be pretty risky beyond hobby projects.
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hot_gril 763 days ago
Yeah, that's why I wouldn't do it. Not totally unusable, but painful.
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