[Node.js] Mali - Minimalistic gRPC Framework

[dbo...@gmail.com]

Hello gRPC group,

I started exploring / learning Protobuf & gRPC a little bit ago, and found it pretty appealing. I mostly use Node.js and the more I played with it, I kept redoing same type of stuff over and over again; so somewhat naturally ended up combining it all into a small module / framework. Here it is:

https://github.com/malijs/mali

*Sigh* Yet another Javascript framework! :D 

It just builds on top of the stock gRPC library. I am pretty familiar with Express, and Koa in Node.js web / REST ecosystem, so it's heavily influenced and inspired by Koa. It's still work in progress, but just wanted to spread the word and welcome any feedback. 

There are a few things I still want to improve upon:

* I think how it performs inspection on the grpc loaded object is somewhat fragile as it depends on the internal structure of the protobuf / grpc representation, which may not be (probably isn't) safe to rely on. It would be nice if there were introspection utility functions provided by gRPC / Protobuf API for getting service definition / constructor, and RPC call definitions and types, and doing something similar.

* I'd like to see where protobuf 6 goes and how that plays out with gRPC, as I think it may be a significant change and improvement in some ways. There is already a PR for the update by someone else: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/pull/9004 So it will be interesting how this changes things.

Anyway check it out, hopefully some will find it interesting or useful.

Thanks,

Bojan