JSON/Http1.x for testing Java based gRPC services

[regu...@gmail.com]

We are moving our services from REST JSON/H1 to gRPC. Teams are very comfortable with tools like Postman and Swagger for integration testing for two reasons:

• No compilation needed to invoke a service
• Text based data definition format i.e. JSON

Our services are implemented using grpc-java and therefore am looking for libraries/approaches to make this work on the JVM. Has anything been done in Java similar to what is described here for go : https://github.com/jnewmano/grpc-json-proxy?

[Carl Mastrangelo]

Not a complete answer, but we typically use grpc_cli (located somewhere on the github.com/grpc/grpc repo, but I don't recall where) which allows you to poke at services.  The server needs to expose the reflection service, which Java exposes in the grpc-services maven library.   

As for plaintext, you can use plaintext proto  (in Java this class class is called TextFormat).  I personally like the proto text format better (no trailing commas, repeated fields don't require list syntax, compilable).    If you want all your data to be passed as plaintext, rather than just for debugging, you can swap out the Marshaller to be any format.   I have a blog post and working example of how to use JSON in gRPC with no Proto dependency at all:   https://grpc.io/blog/grpc-with-json

If you just want it for debugging, you'll have to use a tool that can decode it.   That said, with server reflection turned on, using a tool is not so bad.   (and you need a tool anyways to de-minify your JSON!).

HTH

Carl,

[Regunath Balasubramanian]

Carl,

Thanks for responding and the pointers.

By CLI, maybe you were referring to polyglot?

polyglot allows to specify a local location for the .proto files and therefore the gRPC server did not have to enable Reflection.

For Http, we found a go proxy (polyman) that uses polyglot under the hood. This appears to work (some early tests) and meets our requirements as documented here on our project wiki : GRPC Testing

Thanks again for your help.

Regu

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