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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what your goals are. Protos give a nice API definition if you want to make sure you don't screw up that data that's on the wire (field name misspelled or something similar). Obviously JSON has OpenAPI (swagger), but I'm still a fan of protobufs (probably stockholm syndrome).

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Swagger is handy here. Auto-generate your API model objects, interfaces, and REST clients in any language (e.g. Typescript).

How do you replace Postman? I feel like it's pretty easy to test text encoding formats that are human readable, but not sure how I'd do that with gRPC.

I personally use BloomRPC — just point it at your protos and go. (plus it supports grpc-web)

+1 for Bloom. The only thing it’s missing is support for the gRPC introspection API. It’s not bad if you have all of your organizations protos in one repo (which is what we do), but otherwise annoying to have to clone a repo and point Bloom at the .proto file just to talk to the API. Other tools (grpcui I believe is one) support introspection but aren’t as polished at Bloom.

I would recommend https://kreya.app as the Postman alternative for gRPC. It supports much more features than BloomRPC or Insomnia and has some additional goodies that will help advanced users. For example global authentication configurations or support for easy git syncing.

Disclaimer: I am one of the creators of Kreya

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