Comment by 0l0rin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0l0rin | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for your answer. I think I initially misunderstood the intended purpose of this tool (probably because of how many times the word RPC appears in the text) and assumed it was used for backend-to-backend communication, for which HTTP/JSON seemed extremely sub-optimal given the existing open-source solutions.

While it does make a lot more sense in the context of FE<->BE, the second part of your answer, where you speak about consistency of APIs across many services is still a little confusing, as it suggests BE<->BE communication again. Unless you have a huge, monolithic, internet/browser-facing service (which sounds rather undesirable) it's hard to imagine how browser<->middleware API could get out of hand to the point where it requires a dedicated unification framework.

Rephrasing my question - even though Conjure is not a commercial product (respect to Palantir for contributing to opensource) you must have had a target audience in mind for it: who is it? What exactly is the problem that Conjure is solving better than its existing alternatives?

Our systems look more wide than deep, and the breadth happens both in FE and in BE, so our diverse FE apps communicate with a relatively diverse set of BE services — we’d like those interactions to look unified no matter where you hit the system. In other words: we have a large number of microservices without a consolidating middleware.

Compared to other frameworks, Conjure more easily retrofits into HTTP/JSON service boundaries (no surprise based on its origins) and, IMO, provides great ergonomics for mixed FE/BE teams, especially where FEs are big and complex with lots of BE interaction.

In terms of audience, we’d hope this helps FE/BE teams with easy to use and ergonomic API defs, and think, as above, it’d especially help others who have existing surface area to convert to declarative APIs, even if only as a stepping stone.

On the BE/BE comms point: we use Conjure for all RPCs in our systems — while JSON is obviously not as compact as Protobuf or Thrift we’ve found serialization and transmission are rarely bottlenecks, and that, instead, a unified format and common treatment for clients is a boon for operability and stability — and often times also for aggregate system performance.

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