Chapter 8. HTTP2 overview
gRPC is built on top of the HTTP2 protocol, because the submitted optimizations in relation to HTTP1 perform faster communications between clients and servers.
There are several improvements, such as the cancellation of Header-of-Line Blocking, header compression, the introduction of the binary framing notion, and the support for server push (in order to replace long polling) that make the protocol much more robust and efficient, without modifying the basic application semantics of HTTP.
Early in 2009, two Google software engineers proposed an experimental protocol on top of HTTP, to try to lower load latency on web pages. That protocol was called SPDY. Once the first studies were done, a new branch was created by another group of engineers. HTTP2 was born, taking as a starting point the lessons learned from SPDY.
Both protocols coexisted in parallel for some time. The goal of this partnership was to use SPDY as an experimental branch for testing new propositions...
