API Conference 2019 Workshop: Beyond REST – building APIs with gRPC, SignalR, and OData (part 1)

When it comes to web APIs, RESTful often is the default choice. But what if you need more? What if you need near real-time, duplex communication between systems? What if the client needs a lot of flexibility when querying the API backend? What if you need the best performance you can get when talking to backend Microservices? In this workshop, Rainer Stropek covers three interesting technologies that go beyond traditional, hand-coded RESTful web APIs. Together with Rainer you will dive into WebSockets with SignalR, OData and gRPC. You will only see a few slides in this workshop. The majority of the time we will work through and write code samples in C# and .NET Core.

In this first part, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of RESTful Web APIs. We compare it with gRPC, SignalR, OData, messaging solutions, and GraphQL. Next, we start to take a closer look at the .NET Core 3 implementation of gRPC. More details about gRPC follow in part 2 of the workshop.

00:00 Discuss communication protocols
01:13 gRPC in C# and .NET Core 3