Is the interesting Reactive Socket Protocol http://rsocket.io/ on the roadmap for Akka?
Or have the concepts or ideas perhaps been overcome by other developments?
Just also found https://github.com/rsocket/rsocket-transport-akka
3 Likes
RSocket is very interesting technology and we did some prototyping some time ago.
However, we can’t support everything that is interesting and Akka gRPC has some overlap. In other words RSocket is not on our roadmap.
I was investigating the RSocket RPC project and it led me to this question. I wonder if you were aware of this project and would consider supporting it as an alternative to gRPC?
If the goal is to obtain an Akka Streams interface for protobuf services, Akka gRPC seems like a very heavyweight approach, pulling in all of netty (430K loc) and all of gRPC (515K). In contrast RSocket RPC, used with the Akka transport mentioned above, achieves the same thing in a much simpler way using pure Akka HTTP and with native reactive streams backpressure end-to-end.
The possibility to plug in Aeron as a transport is also very interesting for high-performance applications, as well as native browser support using websocket (unlike gRPC which requires a gateway).
1 Like