Make types usable for server implementation with gRPC

[Ganitzsh]

Thanks for everything you're doing in the Protobuf community.

I have been playing around the BSR and tried to use this Protobuf implementation as types for my grpc-node types (also generated by the registry). Having everything ready to be npm install'd is really awesome I have to say, but unfortunately I could not use the Protobuf-ES generated types to implement my server.

The problem has to do with the way the grpc-node classes are generated, they are comparing messages with instanceof and expect a protobufjs class, which makes it impossible to use the classes from this package in a response.

What is the future of this implementation? I imagine gRPC is not necessarily under the radar, and since some other TS friendly libraries are trying to make things better maybe that'll never be a priority for Buf. It would be nice if Connect was ported to TS as well, so that your entire ecosystem would be native to it.

[timostamm]

Hey Julien, we are releasing a first version of @bufbuild/connect-node in the next couple of days. It's a client and server implementation of the gRPC, gRPC-web, and the Connect protocol. You can find more details in the roadmap discussion on the connect-web repository.

I assume you are using @grpc/grpc-js? You can use it with protobuf-es today, for clients and servers - you just need the following pieces:

1. the static service metadata generated by our plugin protoc-gen-connect-web (also available on the BSR)
2. a function that creates a method definition for @grpc/grpc-js clients and servers from this metadata
3. a mapped TypeScript type that derives a client or service interface from this metadata

We don't publish anything for 2. and 3. yet, but we have a working version here.

Of course it would also be possible to write a code generator plugin for this, and have generated code that is similar to what grpc-tools generates, just using protobuf-es for message types.

[Ganitzsh]

Thanks for the heads up! Excited to try connect with Node I have to say.

I ended up writing the same functions that generate definitions before looking at your code, it's obviously similar and does the job. I think 2 and 3 are what's missing consistency within the TypeScript community, hopefully Connect will catch the wind and change this for the good.

[timostamm]

We put up a PR to support @bufbuild/protobuf with the grpc-tools package: grpc/grpc-node#3005