gRPC is the next big boom in the microservices domain in the coming years that makes server-client communication blazing fast. gRPC runs of HTTP/2 protocol thus it inherits properties like duplex streaming, binary data transfer, and lots more which makes it a lot better than standard HTTP/1.1 based REST communication. As gRPC is very new to the market it will take some time for the developers & architects to adapt to their platform designs.

To ease the problem of efficiently develop and test the gRPC interfaces visually even before deployment. We would like to introduce sConnector - Efficient Visual Testing Platform for gRPC interfaces which will help the developer community solve the issue.

We initially started building sConnector as a supporting project to get some easy-to-use desktop client to test our gRPC interfaces. As time passes by we realized that this could help larger developer community worldwide to solve the same problem we have been facing. So we decided to launch sConnector publicly.

sConnector - gRPC desktop client
sConnector - gRPC desktop client

What makes sConnector unique is its exclusive features as mentioned below:

Unary request:

The simplest possible feature sConnector supports is Unary request. This is very similar to a standard REST API call which will send a request to the server and the server will respond back immediately. Since gRPC is running on HTTP/2, the difference is in the data transport format i.e. BINARY.

Bi-directional streaming request:

Streaming is the most interesting feature support by the gRPC protocol, thus it's also supported by sConnector. It supports both uni-directional streamings as well as bi-directional streaming that helps continuous communication between server and client possible and efficient.

Secured by SSL/TLS:

sConnector supports secured communication for both unary requests as well as bi-directional streaming so that data transport can be completely encrypted for enterprise-grade applications.

Metadata & Headers:

Headers are an integral part of any HTTP request for a long time now. gRPC being a protocol on HTTP/2 also support custom metadata or headers along with its requests. With sConnector we provided an interactive way to send & receive headers to and from server.

Protocol buffers:

Data contracts are defined with protocol buffers in the gRPC transport.