cohere-ai/webrpc

cohere-ai/webrpc

Description: webrpc is a schema-driven approach to writing backend services for modern Web apps and systems

Language: Go

License: MIT

Stars: 4

Forks: 1

Open issues: 19

Created: 2020-09-08T21:38:27Z

Pushed: 2025-04-03T17:52:15Z

Default branch: master

Fork: yes

Parent repository: webrpc/webrpc

Archived: no

README:

webrpc is a schema-driven approach to writing backend servers for the Web. Write your server's api interface in a schema format of [RIDL](./_examples/golang-basics/example.ridl) or [JSON](./_examples/golang-basics/example.webrpc.json), and then run webrpc-gen to generate the networking source code for your server and client apps. From the schema, webrpc-gen will generate application base class types/interfaces, JSON encoders, and networking code. In doing so, it's able to generate fully functioning and typed client libraries to communicate with your server. Enjoy strongly-typed Web services and never having to write an API client library again.

Under the hood, webrpc is a Web service meta-protocol, schema and code-generator tool for simplifying the development of backend services for modern Web applications.

Current code-generation language targets:

• [Go](./gen/golang)
• [Typescript](./gen/typescript)
• [Javascript](./gen/javascript)
• .. contribute more! they're just templates

Quick example

Here is an example webrpc schema in RIDL format (a new documentation-like format introduced by webrpc)

webrpc = v1

name = your-app
version = v0.1.0

message User
- id: uint64
- username: string
- createdAt?: timestamp

message UsersQueryFilter
- page?: uint32
- name?: string
- location?: string

service ExampleService
- Ping()
- Status() => (status: bool)
- GetUserByID(userID: uint64) => (user: User)
- IsOnline(user: User) => (online: bool)
- ListUsers(q?: UsersQueryFilter) => (page: uint32, users: []User)

WebRPC is a design/schema-driven approach to writing backend servers. Write your server's api interface in a schema format of [RIDL](./_examples/golang-basics/example.ridl) or [JSON](./_examples/golang-basics/example.webrpc.json) format and run webrpc-gen to generate source code for your target language.

For example, to generate webrpc server+client code -- run:

bin/webrpc-gen -schema=example.ridl -target=go -pkg=main -server -client -out=./example.gen.go

and see the generated ./example.gen.go file of types, server and client in Go. This is essentially how the golang-basics example was built.

More example apps

• [hello-webrpc](./_examples/hello-webrpc) - webrpc service with Go server and Javascript webapp
• [hello-webrpc-ts](./_examples/hello-webrpc-ts) - webrpc service with Go server and Typescript webapp
• [golang-basics](./_examples/golang-basics) - webrpc service with Go server and Go client
• [golang-nodejs](./_examples/golang-nodejs) - webrpc service with Go server and nodejs (Javascript ES6) client
• [node-ts](./_examples/node-ts) - webrpc service with nodejs server and Typescript webapp client

Why

Writing a Web service / microservice takes a lot of work and time. There are many pieces to build -- designing the routes of your service, agreeing on conventions for the routes with your team, the request payloads, the response payloads, writing the actual server logic, routing the methods and requests to the server handlers, implementing the handlers, and then writing a client library for your desired language so it can speak to your Web service. Yikes, it's a lot of work. Want to add an additional field or handler? yea, you have to go through the entire cycle. And what about type-safety across the wire?

webrpc automates a lot the work for you. Now from a single [webrpc schema file](./schema/README.md), you can use the webrpc-gen cli to generate source code for:

• Strongly-typed request / response data payloads for your target language
• Strongly-typed server interface and methods on the service, aka the RPC methods
• Complete client library to communicate with the web service

Design / architecture

webrpc services speak JSON, as our goals are to build services that communicate with webapps. We optimize for developer experience, ease of use and productivity when building backends for modern webapps. However, webrpc also works great for serviceservice communication, but it won't be as fast as gRPC in that scenario, but I'd be surprised to hear if for the majority of cases that this would be a bottleneck or costly tradeoff.

webrpc is heavily inspired by gRPC and Twirp. It is architecturally the same and has a similar workflow, but simpler. In fact, the webrpc schema is similar in design to protobuf, as in we have messages and rpc methods, but the type system is arguably more flexible and code-gen tooling is simpler. The [webrpc schema](./schema/README.md) is a documentation-like language for describing a server's api interface and the type system within is inspired by Go, Typescript and WASM.

We've been thinking about webrpc's design for years, and were happy to see gRPC and Twirp come onto the scene and pave the way with some great patterns. Over the years and after writing dozens of backends for Javascript-based Webapps and native mobile apps, and even built prior libraries like chi, a HTTP router for Go -- we asked ourselves:

Why have "Rails" and "Django" been such productive frameworks for writing webapps? And the answer we came to is that its productive because the server and client are the same program, running in the same process on the same computer. Rails/Django/others like it, when rendering client-state can just call a function in the same program, the client and the server are within the same domain and same state -- everything is a function-call away. Compare this to modern app development such as writing a React.js SPA or a native iOS mobile app, where the app speaks to an external API server with now the huge added effort to bridge data/runtime from one namespace (the app) to an entirely other namespace (the server). It's too much work and takes too much time, and is too brittle. There is a better way! instead of writing the code.. just generate it. If we generate all of the code to native objects in both app/server, suddenly, we can make a remote service once again feel like calling a method on the same program running on the same computer/process. Remote-Procedure-Call works!

Finally, we'd like to compare generated RPC services…