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Speaking from painful experience, gRPC is an absolutely terrible choice for client-server interactions. Google (its creator) discourages its use except for server-to-server, and Improbable labs' grpc-web library is handcuffed to brittle and rapidly-aging web tooling.

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GRPC is compact; in some cases it's important.

What would you suggest, beyond the standard "ReST" and GraphQL, with OpenAPI as a declarative description?

For a compact message format being sent to browsers, you might look at messagepack, eg with https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-javascript – it's essentially binary JSON, so it'd be compatible with OpenAPI specs.

I think the ser/des is slower than JSON in most browsers, but the message format is smaller.

Oftentimes, using a query parameter like `?exclude[]=…` or `?include[]=…` or similar to say "only get me these response fields, not the whole object" can be useful for this too (and then you still get JSON back).

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