gRPC Channels

This repo provides an abstraction for an RPC connection: the Channel. Implementations of Channel can provide alternate transports -- different from the standard HTTP/2-based transport provided by the google.golang.org/grpc package.

This can be useful for providing new transports, such as HTTP 1.1, web sockets, or (significantly) in-process channels for testing.

This repo also contains two such alternate transports: an HTTP 1.1 implementation of gRPC (which supports all stream kinds other than full-duplex bidi streams) and an in-process transport (which allows a process to dispatch handlers implemented in the same program without needing serialize and de-serialize messages over the loopback network interface).

In order to use channels with your proto-defined gRPC services, you need to use a protoc plugin included in this repo: protoc-gen-grpchan.

go install github.com/fullstorydev/grpchan/cmd/protoc-gen-grpchan

You use the plugin via a --grpchan_out parameter to protoc. Specify the same output directory to this parameter as you supply to --go_out. The plugin will then generate *.pb.grpchan.go files, alongside the *.pb.go files. These additional files contain additional methods that let you use the proto-defined service methods with alternate transports.

//go:generate protoc --go_out=plugins=grpc:. --grpchan_out=. my.proto