Frontend backend communication?

[strasdat]

Question

What are the best alternatives to communicate from front-end rust/yew to back-end rust? Somewhere I read that some folks use GraphQL. But I'm wondering whether there is a more direct, more rusty approach...

Am I just unaware of corresponding technology, or do we have to invent something?

[teymour-aldridge]

Sascha Grunert has published a project building a web application with Yew which uses the Cap'n Proto protocol for data transfer which is really neat.

Yew also provides a Fetch service and WebSocket service which you could send GraphQL queries using (or use to connect to a RESTful API).

[jstarry]

Yeah, I think it's on you to pick your transport protocol (http or ws), request protocol (jsonrpc, graphql, etc), and encoding (json, binary, capn proto). Yew has wrappers around fetch and WebSocket which could be used to build a request protocol but they aren't needed. Ideally the rust / wasm ecosystem evolves such that graphql, jsonrpc, etc client libraries support wasm targets by building on web-sys or other abstractions over the browser APIs.

For example, for work we've been exploring the use of https://github.com/google/tarpc which is pretty close to being able to build to wasm and makes it easy to provide your own transport (in our case websockets).

So, you may have to fork an existing client to get it working with wasm, I would be surprised if you had to write a totally new graphql client, but I'm not familiar with those rust projects.

[teymour-aldridge]

I'm working on a GraphQL client (still very early on in the process, but it looks like it might show some promise), which is something like a Relay or Apollo GraphQL clone. You might be interested in it.

[kellpossible]

Tarpc looks excellent, can't remember if it has wasm support yet.
I'm currently using websockets + serde + serde_json for a work project. Might swap out serde_json for something else later if it becomes a bottleneck, but it does make testing/debugging easy.
For an rpc framework, jsonrpc is pretty simple and could be implemented yourself if none of the existing rust libraries fit your needs.