Why does gRPC matter?

Now that we have a sense of what gRPC is, we can get into why it matters. To explain gRPC’s role, we are going to compare it with two other ways of performing client/server communication. The first one is the traditional REST API architecture based on HTTP and JSON, and the second one is GraphQL.

REST

While I am assuming that most of you reading this book are familiar with REST APIs, I still believe that it is important to introduce the principles of designing such APIs. It will help us understand in which ways gRPC is like REST and in which it differs.

A REST API, as with every other technology in this comparison study, is an interface between an information provider and a consumer. When writing such an API, we expose endpoints on specific URLs (routes) that can be used by a client to create, read, update, and delete resource(s).

However, REST APIs are different from gRPC and GraphQL. The main difference is that REST is not a framework—...