There is quite a lot of talk around gRPC lately. This article will introduce you to gRPC, what it actually is, how does it compare to REST Protocol, and really when to use it, some concepts on Protocol Buffers. Further, we will also go through a demonstration of working with gRPC in ASP.NET Core to get a complete picture of this trending technology coupled with ASP.NET Core. You can find the complete source code of the the below built application here.
It’s quite an un-deniable fact that REST APIs has ruled over the data communication world for quite a long now. Although it’s been the go-to approach for providing data linkage between client and server, there are quite a lot of drawbacks too. It may be minor, but here are a few.
- The response payload size may grow drastically due to the usage of JSON formatted data. Add some bad code practices to this, and you end up with much slower request-response times.
- Do we all really follow the REST principles? It’s quite hard and not very practical to follow the REST Principles while building a realtime application. Getting your colleagues co-relate with your thought process can be quite challenging, yeah?
- The market already has a better variant that is much faster and easier to develop.
This is where gRPC comes into the game.
Table of Contents
- Introducing gRPC in ASP.NET Core
- REST vs gRPC
- What are Protocol Buffers?
- How gRPC Work?
- What we will build
- Working with gRPC in ASP.NET Core
- Getting used to the gRPC Project Structure
- Building a gRPC Client
- Let’s build our own gRPC Service
- Summary
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Is gRPC faster than REST API?
#asp.net core
