gRPC is not the new REST

We used REST with gRPC in our MediaLibrary application in Chapter 4, Connecting Client and Server with REST API. So, why am I saying that we can’t replace every REST API with gRPC? Remember the main reason mentioned in Chapter 5, Building gRPC Services: gRPC is not widely supported in browsers. Also, not every programming language has support for this feature.

The REST API uses XML or JSON format to communicate between the client and server. These formats are human-readable and supported in probably every programming language that we can imagine.

REST has become a standard to provide APIs to communicate between applications. Nowadays, XML format is supported mostly only for backward compatibility; every new API is written to primarily support JSON format.

Note

When creating an API in .NET, JSON format is used to format requests and responses. You can support XML format by just adding one line of code to the ConfigureServices method in the...