What is a gRPC API and How Does it Work?

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gRPC has become an important technology for implementing distributed software systems that need to run fast on a massive scale. In short, gRPC is an API framework that allows a program in one location on the internet to pass data to a distinct function in another program at another location on the internet for processing. By Bob Reselman, @CogArtTech.

gRPC has drawn significant interest from the development community since the specification was released as open-source by Google in February of 2015.

In this article, we’re going to discuss how gRPC emerged on the landscape of distributed computing. Also, we’re going to present an overview of the gRPC specification and show how the specification is implemented using a demonstration gRPC API created especially for this series of articles.

The main content of this article:

  • The need for inter-process communication
  • Remote Procedure Calls, the precursor to gRPC
  • Implementations of RPC
    • Stored Procedures
    • RPC and ERP
    • RPC under Java
    • XML-RPC
  • The emergence of gRPC
  • The gRPC Framework in a Nutshell

Basic concepts behind gRPC

Source: https://www.programmableweb.com/news/what-grpc-api-and-how-does-it-work/analysis/2020/10/08

Streaming is a powerful feature of gRPC and one that deserves additional attention. gRPC is an important framework on the API development landscape. The use of Protocol Buffers, which is foundational to the gRPC specification offers a way to facilitate lightning-fast data transfers over the network. Excellent read!

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Tags apis microservices app-development performance web-development