Tonic: 0.2 release with the future in mind!

After a few months of work we finally have released tonic 0.2. This release marks the start of a new path for tonic.

Generic encoding

Originally, tonic was a wrapper around hyper, tower and prost providing a good out of the box experience for protobuf based gRPC services. With 0.2 tonic still provides a great out of box experience for protobuf but now also supports other encoding formats! tonic has always supported custom codecs via the tonic::codec::Codec trait but codegen would always tie directly to prost. Which means that if you wanted to write a custom codec you would have to manually replicate what tonic-build does. This is no longer true as we now have traits that can be implemented within tonic-build to guide codegen in the correct direction.

In the future, tonic will also provide support for flatbuffers via the new work in-progress butte crate! tonic 0.2 supports the groundwork for this and we will create an accompanying crate that will provide all the types you need in the future.

Healthchecks

Another common feature request has been providing a way to support gRPC healthchecks. After some work @jen20 has implemented the tonic-health crate which provides support for server side health reporting.

let (mut health_reporter, health_service) = tonic_health::server::health_reporter();

// Set our Greeter service to serving.
health_reporter
        .set_serving::<GreeterServer<MyGreeter>>()
        .await;

// Add healthcheck service to our router
Server::builder()
    .add_service(health_service)
    .add_service(GreeterServer::new(greeter))
    .serve(addr)
    .await?;

Example can be found here.

v0.2.0

Thanks to all the wonderful contributors for helping get this release over the finish line. As always, there is a changelog and an issue tracker if you run into any issues. Please, feel welcome to also join us on discord if you need any help!

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