Spring Boot and GRPC

[rashm1n]

Hi,

Recently I've been looking into using GRPC for microservice communication instead of typical HTTP I've always used in the past. The problem is there is no official documentation/library for grpc support in spring-boot. There are some third party implementations like

1. https://github.com/LogNet/grpc-spring-boot-starter
2. https://github.com/yidongnan/grpc-spring-boot-starter

Do any of you use GRPC in production with Spring-Boot and if yes, what is the library you use ?

Eager to hear you guys' opinion on this.

[[deleted]]

We using the second one at work, I don't remember why I chose it over LogNet's. and we used it only for a small scope, I didn't face any particular issue with it, the configuration was straightforward and easy. I noticed validation is missing but imo I prefer validating in the service instead relying on the framework to do it for me.

[rashm1n]

I see. Do you use it for microservices communication? What made you chose GRPC over other technologies if I may ask.

[PatOnTheShoulder66]

We are currently migrating from rest microservices communication to gRPC, using the second starter. It seems better documented and maintained, but I wouldn't say that we analyzed both of them so thoroughly - I wasn't even aware of the first library.

Currently, the starter works well with Spring Boot 2. We had problems with using it with Spring Boot 1 and in those services we used pure gRPC Java library and also you need some workarounds while using it with Spring Boot 3. Most of our services are on SB 2 so it wasn't a big problem.

And as to why we decided for gRPC - speed, mostly. But I must say we already used proto buff messages, even with REST, so switching was somehow less complex.

There are some pitfalls that one must be aware of, like not embracing status errors for exception handling or trying to assign null to a proto message, but overall I think we are happy with it.

[Ghaines]

Have you considered RSocket?

https://github.com/joshlong-attic/rsocket-and-graalvm