REST – Representational State Transfer is the most common way of data communication and is based on HTTP 1.1. The data format are generally XML or JSON. HTTP Status codes are usually used for statuses, and sometimes the payload has the statuses.
gRPC – Google’s Remote Procedure Call is a more modern method and based on HTTP 2. Due to HTTP 2 some older software or browsers might not have support. But, gRPC is the way forward. The advantages are several, I am mentioning some of the advantages here:
- High performance serializer and deserializer based on protobuf binary format.
- The data size is much lesser compared with JSON / XML.
- Server to client communication (based on existing connection), Client to server communication, Streaming from Server to Client (on existing connection), Streaming from Client to Server and even duplex communication.
- Efficient usage of networking i.e because gRPC is based on HTTP 2, network connections need not be opened for every call.
.Net has fully embraced and supports modern code generation for gRPC. In further blog posts, I will explain and provide some code samples for using gRPC in .Net.
I personally have not performed any speed tests trying to compare REST vs gRPC but, I did use gRPC in some micro-service architecture application and found the performance of gRPC significantly higher than REST.
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Mr. Kanti Kalyan Arumilli
B.Tech, M.B.A
Founder & CEO, Lead Full-Stack .Net developer
ALight Technology And Services Limited
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