Proxy still needed with HTTP/2 supported by most browsers?

[aherreraGH]

Hello everyone,

Fairly new to gRPC world here.

General question, I've been reading that just about all major browsers (except IE) now offer > 90% support for HTTP/2. So, I'm curious, is the proxy like EnvoyProxy still required? Some articles I reviewed stated the need for Envoy as HTTP2 is not widely accepted. The articles are 2+ years old.

If a proxy is still required/needed:
Suggestions on getting golang server grpc to talk with grpc-web? I have tried EnvoyProxy with no success, perhaps there is a better alternative proxy option out there? Could I use built-in proxy similar to ViteJS / Express / Webpack middleware? Anyone have examples with these?

If a proxy is no longer needed:
How would I go about communicating with a golang grpc server using grpc-web? I did find there is an NPM package for fetch-h2, http2-client, and others. Wondering if they would do the job as mentioned above, whereas browsers now support http2 mostly - from what I read.

Thank you in advance.

[sampajano]

@aherreraGH Hi! Thanks for asking! Will answer below 😃

General question, I've been reading that just about all major browsers (except IE) now offer > 90% support for HTTP/2. So, I'm curious, is the proxy like EnvoyProxy still required? Some articles I reviewed stated the need for Envoy as HTTP2 is not widely accepted. The articles are 2+ years old.

You're indeed right that HTTP/2 is widely available.

Although, the lack of HTTP/2 availability was NOT the reason why grpc-web protocol was created in the first place; rather, it is because the gRPC protocol relied on HTTP/2 framing, which is NOT exposed in browsers APIs, and likely never will be.

As it is mentioned in the protocol doc:

decouple from HTTP/2 framing which is not, and will never be, directly exposed by browsers

As such, a proxy would still be required in the foreseeable future.

---

If a proxy is still required/needed:

Suggestions on getting golang server grpc to talk with grpc-web? I have tried EnvoyProxy with no success, perhaps there is a better alternative proxy option out there?

There is a good amount of proxy options you could consider. See https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web#proxy-interoperability for the list of proxies with grpc-web support.

Could I use built-in proxy similar to ViteJS / Express / Webpack middleware? Anyone have examples with these?

I'm not aware of any supported built-in proxies as of today. But my knowledge is limited :)

Hope that helps!

[aherreraGH]

Thank you!