Dispatch events over gRPC

[abichinger]

I have been playing around with gRPC as an alternative to dart:ffi. So far I only tried it on my local system with a single user.

Generating dart files

mkdir appflowy_flutter/packages/appflowy_backend/lib/protobuf/flowy-grpc
protoc --dart_out=grpc:appflowy_flutter/packages/appflowy_backend/lib/protobuf/flowy-grpc -I rust-lib/flowy-grpc/proto flowygrpc.proto

The code generation should be done inside flowy_codegen, but I couldn't figure out how to do that.

Running the server

cd rust-lib/flowy-grpc
RUST_LOG=trace cargo run --bin grpc-server

using docker:

docker build -t appflowy-grpc .
docker run -d -p 50051:50051 --name appflowy appflowy-grpc

Feature Preview

Screencast.2023-04-11.01.34.08.mp4

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PR Checklist

• My code adheres to the AppFlowy Style Guide
• I've listed at least one issue that this PR fixes in the description above.
• I've added a test(s) to validate changes in this PR, or this PR only contains semantic changes.
• All existing tests are passing.

[appflowy]

@abichinger Nice try! That is a new way to passthrough the data to the backend.

I am not sure is it work on mobile platform too and it seems like FFI is faster than gRPC.

[abichinger]

Thanks!

According to https://pub.dev/packages/grpc all platforms are supported.
It is certainly slower than FFI, but gRPC enables the backend to be hosted on a cloud server.

[Xazin]

Thanks!

According to https://pub.dev/packages/grpc all platforms are supported. It is certainly slower than FFI, but gRPC enables the backend to be hosted on a cloud server.

Except Web (At least without grpc-web) - It's weird why it's not in supported platforms if they have support for it.

[appflowy]

Thanks!

According to https://pub.dev/packages/grpc all platforms are supported. It is certainly slower than FFI, but gRPC enables the backend to be hosted on a cloud server.

Multiple AppFlowy instances can share the same backend that hosts on the cloud. Correct me if I was wrong

[abichinger]

Yes that should be possible. (Haven't tested it yet)
I suspect there could be some problems if multiple AppFlowy instances try to access the backend simultaneously, because the backend isn't stateless.

[appflowy]

Yes that should be possible. (Haven't tested it yet) I suspect there could be some problems if multiple AppFlowy instances try to access the backend simultaneously, because the backend isn't stateless.

Yep, each instance of the backend is belonging to a user.

[appflowy]

@abichinger I am going to close this issue. Maybe we can reopen it in the future.