Let's give REST a rest: exploring the state of gRPC in Ruby
Fernando Perales • September 12, 2024 • Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina • Talk

I'll present some of the advantages of gRPC such as duplex streaming, auto generated client code, connection pool and first class load balancing, and how it can be applied. I'll also talk about the main disadvantages of implementing gRPC in an existing codebase.

gRPC has been around for a while and, even though it's neither a replacement of REST nor a better option for building APIs, it is an alternative that can be useful in certain cases where we can benefit from lightweight messages, built-in code generation and high performance. In this talk I'll share the concepts, pros and cons, and use cases of gRPC with examples in Ruby.

We'll start with a quick refresher on HTTP and REST. We'll move along with an introduction to gRPC/protobuf architecture and we will go through a demo on how to integrate gRPC in our Ruby applications and how to make it communicate with a Go service and we'll wrap up our session with some use cases where you may consider using gRPC instead of a REST API

EuRuKo 2024