Google readies next-gen RPC protocol to replace JSON

From InfoWorld: With the 1.0 release of its gRPC protocol, Google aims to provide a next-generation standard for server-to-server communications in an age of cloud microservices.

Originally unveiled early last year, gRPC was conceived as a transport framework for handling both public- and private-facing service endpoints. It uses HTTP/2 for its network features -- flow control, header compression, multiplexing requests for speed -- and employs another Google invention, called protocol buffers, to transmit the actual RPC data.

Both of these features are meant to improve the traditional method of having web services talk to each other by sending JSON-encoded data over HTTP. Connections between servers with HTTP/2 are supposed to be faster and more efficient, and Google claims it's faster still to serialize and deserialize the data with protocol buffers than with JSON. (Google provides gRPC and protocol buffer platform libraries for most major languages.)

The 1.0 release touts ease of use, API stability, and breadth of support (e.g., Python 3). Previously, if you wanted to use gRPC, you had to put together a number of the pieces yourself. To get set up with the current release, developers do little more than install the needed library from a given language's package manager.

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