Adapting a gRPC service to REST with ScalaPB Gateway

Now that we have seen a Scala gRPC service and a Scala RESTful service it's only natural to wonder if there is any middle ground. You want to have a nice and performant backend but you could also  have a lot of RESTful legacy code or be really into curl. Your wish is my command.

The first piece of the puzzle is the fact that GOOG has a standard for mapping REST APIs onto protobuf declarations. With no hacks or any hard thinking you can augment your existing proto files to be REST-friendly.

The second piece is making use of such a mapping. Apparently there is a Go implementation of what is known as gRPC Gateway. It can work with any gRPC service and so could be used with the ones implemented in Scala. But there is another, arguably more appealing option. The ScalaPB library we met before can generate a Scala RESTful gateway too. I guess it's not as well tested or supported but then again there is not that much code behind it to prevent it from serious use.

So I went ahead and updated my two-service gRPC example to support ScalaPB REST Gateway generation. It intentionally borrows a lot from the pure gRPC example so that the difference can be easily seen by comparing files. Technically, you still need exactly the same gRPC service implementation as before. The proto files are almost the same.

There are two new objects. To begin with we need a new abstraction to wire together the generated Gateway code. It's essentially a gRPC client with hooks to plug the RESTful stuff into it. The other is just a typical HTTP client. I followed the path of least resistance and used Jackson for JSON marshaling and commons-http for sending requests. There is a little wiring but in general the code speaks for itself.

What I learned from this exercise is that making gRPC co-exist with REST is easy. I am not sure if running a Gateway locally for each service instance is a better idea than creating a single API Gateway service to front the rest of the backend.

As a parting note, I am surprised there is no other IDL for describing RESTful services for the purpose of code generation. With a standard AST and parser library it would be quite strait forward to generate REST endpoints for any popular service framework. It's equally surprising that the Akka team does not have a generator for akka-http endpoint from protobuf declarations. It looks like such a natural step for them and the ScalaPB project even has the foundation in place.