gRPC-web and React: A match made in Heaven

In this post, we’ll be exploring ReactRPC, a client-side integration library for React and gRPC-web to help developers have an easier time creating a full end-to-end gRPC service architecture.

What is gRPC-web?

For the past few years, gRPC has been the gold standard of performant and scalable frameworks for microservice interactivity. By converting all data down to binary, gRPC is able to send information over the internet at a much faster pace and be easily understandable by any popular programming language. Companies such as Google, Netflix, and Spotify have all rallied behind it, announcing total migration away from current internal communication frameworks to fully adopt gRPC across their server architecture.

In order to tap into the power of gRPC in the browser, Google and Improbable have both built out two different implementations of a client-side library called gRPC-web. While this is an amazing milestone, creating more seamless integration for backends written in any popular language to directly engage with clients, gRPC-web still has quite a few details to iron out before it comfortably finds a home in most front-end developers toolkits. In particular, one pain point has been adopting gRPC-web into modern web frameworks that all developers use for building out large-scale applications.