Nice GRPC web 🚀

[ChristopheBougere]

I just saw that you refactored the repo with lerna to enable a nice-grpc-web package 🤩

As nice-grpc already made my code a lot cleaner, and as I'll have to implement a web version soonish, I am quite curious:
Are you planning to wrap the official grpc/grpc-web? Or maybe improbable-eng/grpc-web?

Can't wait to see this released 🤗

[aikoven]

Hey, thank you for your interest.

I've been working on it for the past week, and I can say that it's mostly finished. You can expect the release somewhere next week.

What's left are the docs (mostly repeating the docs for nice-grpc, so should not take long) and some internal testing with my company's web apps.

Also one missing part is the support for ts-proto (waiting for PR stephenh/ts-proto#316 to get merged).

nice-grpc-web will be based on @improbable-eng/grpc-web. I chose it because of the support for client- and bidi-streaming calls via their custom websocket proxy. Though it also works fine with official Envoy filter, as well as Contour ingress controller for Kubernetes, which is based on Envoy. With Envoy, only unary and server streaming methods are supported, although I find it more convenient to use.

There will be another package, nice-grpc-common containing common data structures and types for both nice-grpc and nice-grpc-web, like Metadata and middleware types. This would allow to build isomorphic client middleware that can be used on both Node.js and the browser. This would introduce small breaking changes to nice-grpc.

[ChristopheBougere]

Oh that's great to know, thanks for all the details 👌

I was also leaning towards @improbable-eng/grpc-web for the client-side support, but my choice wasn't 100% made.

Also, I didn't know about ts-proto, but I may have a look as I have some limitations with google-protobuf for enums.

[aikoven]

I published all the fresh stuff — check it out!

I highly recommend ts-proto, it's much more ergonomic and feature-rich than google-protobuf, and it's also very customizable via many different options.

[ChristopheBougere]

Thanks, I gave it a first try (along with ts-proto) and it seems to work pretty well 👌

[ChristopheBougere]

Also, about ts-proto, I needed to add the following option to the grpc_tools_node_protoc command to make it work: --plugin=./node_modules/.bin/protoc-gen-ts_proto
Not sure if that's specific to my setup

[aikoven]

Plugins are auto-discovered when they are in the PATH. See https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/cpp/google.protobuf.compiler.plugin

If you place compilation command into a package.json script, NPM includes node_modules/.bin in the PATH automatically.

I'll update the docs to mention this.

[ChristopheBougere]

Ah OK, good to know 👍