Reliability of bidirectional streams?

[sjmu...@gmail.com]

I've been evaluating grpc, specifically around realtime communication with bidirectional message streams in the context of client (mobile devices) to server.  Naturally, the comparisons are against established solutions using websockets (think engine.io, socketcluster, autobahn, primus, etc.).  Many of these libraries focus on reliable messaging, so things like reconnection, connection health (server client ping) are baked in or available with plugins.

Is grpc meant to be an alternative solution for these types of apps, albeit with http/2 rather than websockets?  Are there plans to provide features as mentioned above, along with other necessary aspects (like pub sub, for example)? 

[Louis Ryan]

Sam,

I guess it depends on your definition of reliable. GRPC will implement the features you mention (auto-reconnect, load-balancing & failover, health checking etc.) These are generally considered to be 'connection reliability' features and are somewhat distinct from true pub-sub semantics like 'at least once' delivery guarantees for messages where delivery ACKs are required. GRPC won't provide those but then neither do primus, socketcluster & co.

-Louis

On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 4:26 PM, <sjmu...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been evaluating grpc, specifically around realtime communication with bidirectional message streams in the context of client (mobile devices) to server.  Naturally, the comparisons are against established solutions using websockets (think engine.io, socketcluster, autobahn, primus, etc.).  Many of these libraries focus on reliable messaging, so things like reconnection, connection health (server client ping) are baked in or available with plugins.

Is grpc meant to be an alternative solution for these types of apps, albeit with http/2 rather than websockets?  Are there plans to provide features as mentioned above, along with other necessary aspects (like pub sub, for example)? 

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[Rob Cecil]

Sam,

You say "will implement..". Are you actually talking about future feature/capability, or present capability.

What is not clear to me is the LB, Failover aspects of Channels.

[Louis Ryan]

Auto-reconnect I believe is implemented for most languages (I know it is for Java). Load-Balancing & Failover are in active discussion and that necessarily implies health checking. To some extent health-checking is already built into HTTP2 via the PING frame but what is missing is an API to surface that in all languages, in this case Java already has one.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/grpc-io/dba5f8ad-f5c4-47d6-8ee0-e9620f33ef5d%40googlegroups.com.