This is a project to explore the use of javascript and python to communicate with a new Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service, tentatively called gCDM. gCDM is based on the gRPC framework. The service and message structures are defined using Protocol Buffers, Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. Protocol Buffer message definition files (.proto files) can be compiled into source code for multiple languages using the protoc compiler. gRPC services defined using Protocol Buffer definitions can be compiled into client and server code using additional compiler plugins. This project uses the protobuf-gradle-plugin to manage the generation of javascript and python source code for both the messages and service associated with gCDM. Javascript gRPC code is generated using the grpc-web plugin, and python gRPC code is generated using the python gRPC plugin obtained from https://packages.grpc.io/.

• JDK 8 or later
• docker and docker-compose

From the top level directory of this repository, simply run:

./gradlew clean build

and gradle will do the rest.

Generated javascript code will appear under grpc-web/src/main/js/, and generated python code will appear under grpc-python/src/main/python/. These generated files are removed when the clean task is called. Generated python files will end with _pb2.py or _pb2_grpc.py. Generated JavaScript files will end with _pb.js. Be sure that you do not name your development files in a way that uses those endings! git will ignore them by default, and they will be removed by the clean task (bad times).

In order to develop code that speaks to a gCDM server, you will need to spin-up a local server for development. Please see gcdm-local/README.md for more information on how to use gradle and docker to manage this without (hopefully) much heartache.

If you just want to get up and running quickly, use

./gradlew :gcdm-local:composeUp

At this point, you should be ready to interact with the server using the code in either the grpc-python or grpc-web subprojects. When finished, be sure to run:

./gradlew :gcdm-local:composeDown

to tear down the local gCDM server.