just a casual sentence at the end? How about no. It's in the name, a query-oriented API, useless if you don't need flexible queries.
Why don't you address the problem they talked about, what is the cli tool I can use to test grpc, what about gui client?
In general though I agree devex for gRPC is poor. I primarily work with the Python and Go APIs and they can be very frustrating. Basic operations like "turn pbtypes.Timestamp into a Python datetime or Go time.Time" are poorly documented and not obvious. proto3 removing `optional` was a flub and then adding it back was an even bigger flub; I have a bunch of protos which rely on the `google.protobuf.Int64Value` wrapper types which can never be changed (without a massive migration which I'm not doing). And even figuring out how to build the stuff consistently is a challenge! I had to build out a centralized protobuf build server that could use consistent versions of protoc plus the appropriate proto-gen plugins. I think buf.build basically does this now but they didn't exist then.
No need to be snarky; that API did not exist when I started using protobuf. The method was called `TimestampProto` which is not intuitive, especially given the poor documentation available. And it required error handling which is unergonomic. Given that they switched it to timestamppb.New, they must've agreed with me. https://github.com/golang/protobuf/blame/master/ptypes/times... <-- and you can still see the full code from this era on master because of the migration from `github.com/golang/protobuf` to `google.golang.org/protobuf`, which was a whole other exercise in terrible DX.
Right but, the typical web service at the typical startup does need flexible queries. I feel people both overestimate its implications and under estimate its value.
- Standard "I need everything" in the model call
- Simplified "I need two properties call", like id + display name for a dropdown
- I need everything + a few related fields, which maybe require elevated permissions
I'm convinced at this point that GraphQL only works effectively at a small scale, where inefficient queries aren't disastrously slow/heavy, OR at a large enough scale where you can dedicate at least an entire team of engineers to constantly tackle performance issues, caching, etc.
To me it also makes no sense at startups, which don't generally have such a high wall between frontend and backend engineering. I've seen it used at two startups, and both spent way more time on dealing with GraphQL BS than it would have taken to either ask another team to do query updates or just learn to write SQL. Indeed, at $CURRENT_JOB the engineering team for a product using GraphQL actively pushed for moving away from it and to server-side rendering with Svelte and normal knex-based SQL queries, despite the fact that none of them were backend engineers by trade. The GraphQL was just too difficult to reason about from a performance perspective.
> To me it also makes no sense at startups, which don't generally have such a high wall between frontend and backend engineering.
Startups are where I've seen it work really well, because it's the same team doing it and you're always solving the same problem either way: this page needs this data, so we need to assemble this data (and/or adjust what we actually show on this page) out of the database we have, and add appropriate indices and/or computed pre-aggregations to make that work. Even if you make a dedicated backend endpoint to provide that data for that page, you've still got to solve that same problem. GraphQL just means less boilerplate and more time to focus on the actual business logic - half the time I forgot we were even using it.
The client is the easy part if you just want to test calls.
It's actually still nice even if you don't use the flexibility. Throw up GraphiQL and you've got the testing tool you were worried about. (Sure, it's not a command line tool, but people don't expect that for e.g. SQL databases).
Use https://connectrpc.com/ and then you can use curl, postman, or any HTTP tool of your choosing that supports sending POST requests.