Discover the key differences between REST and gRPC, two popular frameworks for designing APIs. Learn about their working models, communication formats, brows...

Amplication's platform is a resource for developers and entrepreneurs, offering insights into low-code application development, rapid prototyping, and software project management. Through articles, tutorials, and case studies, Amplication offers insights into building CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications, generating code from visual models, and automating development workflows. Readers can learn about customizing application logic, integrating third-party services, and deploying applications with minimal code to accelerate time to market and reduce development costs.

Amplication

REST has been around for a long time and is an industry standard for developing and designing APIs. Google Remote Procedure Call, or gRPC, was created on top of the RPC protocol. The Amplication repository is about to hit 10,000-stars on GitHub.

REST vs. gRPC - What’s the Difference?

For REST payload size can be medium to large where payload size for gRPC is small. Also REST has higher text parsing compare to gRPC.

This is interesting. I’ve heard of RPC but this is the first time I’ve heard of gRPC. It looks really intriguing and I would love to learn more about it.
I did a quick google and found a website that explains it in depth at <a href="http://grpc.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">grpc.io</a> which would be helpful for anyone looking to find out more information about the protocol and examples on integrating it.

Although browser compatibility is important for accessibility, I don’t really see the purpose. Most developers who would use gRPC would prefer modern browsers, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
I have never used gRPC but the concept seems exciting.

Excited to see my blog post again on daily.dev ! I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on the topic. Let’s learn from each other and spark engaging discussions.

I think this article is incorrect:
<ul>
<li>“rest calls are made sequentially”: this is plain false, it depends on what http client and server you are using, http2 client/server will use multiplexing regardless working with grpc libraries or plain rest.
In browsers this is handled automatically by the browser itself.</li>
<li>“protobuf are more reliable than rest payloads” this is unclear, they are the same from an architecture stand point since both of them translates in a http request while from a dx standpoint there are differences but i don’t think one can be defined as better than the other.</li>
<li>“high latency on rest”: this is unclear, they both run on the same technology so they both have the same constraints and latency mostly depends on the network architecture rather than the application code.</li>
<li>some comments cited “grpc payload are smaller and rest has higher text parsing” while this is usually true unless you want to build a custom parser to parse “compressed” payloads on rest, this is most of the time irrelevant. I think payload size is a topic when the difference between the two are of ~100kb. Use grpc to save 1,2,10kb of data seems overkill to me.</li>
</ul>
This instead are some grpc advantages in my opinion:
<ul>
<li>out of the box support to limit the response size to the requested fields</li>
<li>out of the box support for request payload validation</li>
</ul>