The purpose of this document is to collect all the features that we believe are useful for gRPC users.
gRPC-Web has been developed internally at Google as part of the front-end stacks for Google's Web applications and cloud services. Over time we plan to open-source and publish most of the features and make them available to open-source users.
Like everywhere, Web platforms and technologies are constantly evolving, often with many inter-dependent ecosystems. As much as we like to open-source everything, we also need keep the balance between creating a reusable and stable open-source solution and meeting those requirements unique to Google's Web applications (such as search).
Migrate the codebase to TypeScript and update the related toolchains (incl. remove
dependency on closure-compiler). Enhance overall TypeScript support.
Enhance Fetch/streams support (e.g. cancellation support) and improve runtime support, including service workers.
See streaming roadmap here.
We plan to leverage WebTransport for bi-directional streaming.
Also see the dedicate road-map doc on bidi streaming.
The binary protobuf encoding format is not most CPU efficient for browser clients. Furthermore, the generated code size increases as the total protobuf definition increases.
For Google's Web applications (e.g. gmail), we use a JSON like format which is comparable to JSON in efficiency but also very compact in both the message size and code size.
We plan to publish a comprehensive guideline doc on how to create secure Web applications.
Native support such as XSRF, XSS prevention may also be added to the gRPC-Web protocol.
In-process proxies will eliminate the need to deploy Envoy to use gRPC-Web.
We have plans to add in-process proxy support in Python, Java, Node, C++ etc. Let us know if you are interested in implementing any language-specific in-process gRPC-Web proxy.
To minimize maintenance overhead, we will only support Envoy as the official proxy for gRPC-Web.
This is to provide first-class support for gRPC API and gRPC-Web in popular Web frameworks such as Angular.
Note: Dart gRPC will use gRPC-Web as the underlying implementation on the Dart Web platform.
With the addition of CommonJS style imports, gRPC-Web client stubs can now be compiled with various tools such as Browserify, Webpack, etc. Let us know what else we should try!
This allows the user to construct and submit a gRPC request directly using the browser.
We need define a standard look & feel for creating and rendering nested protobuf messages.