Thinking Beyond the REST API: gRPC for Android

Speakers: Samantha Bobra
Sources: droidcon San Francisco 2017

Most modern Android apps that rely on a web backend use a REST API to communicate with the server. REST is tried and true, but maybe you've heard about gRPC, an open source RPC framework from Google that uses HTTP/2 and is currently popular in the web development community but is also available on mobile. Using gRPC for communication between your app and server can offer performance benefits and is user-friendly, meaning that making API calls can be as easy as calling a method. In this talk, you will learn how the gRPC framework works, the benefits of the Protocol Buffer (Protobuf) data format compared to JSON, and how you can build a gRPC client (backed by OkHttp) for Android. Find out how to use gRPC to improve the speed and convenience of the networking in your Android app, and hear about how it has helped us at VSCO.

Видео Thinking Beyond the REST API: gRPC for Android канала The droidCon Archive