Postman has announced support for gRPC and is currently in beta. Developers will now be able to test gRPC APIs with Postman v9.7.1. Postman now offers users with interoperability of using an API platform that can understand WebSockets, GraphQL and Socket.IO.
Upon loading the API’s Protobuf definition (.proto file), Postman now will automatically gain an understanding of the services and methods available and generate example payloads for each method. This will speed up testing. In addition, developers can save their Protobuf definitions to the Postman cloud, which allows sharing within the organisation, and collaborate and manage them as part of the API lifecycle.
The features that come with the new update include call unary, client-streaming, server-streaming, and bidirectional-streaming gRPC methods. Developers will be able to utilise autocomplete while composing messages. Other features include: client-side type-checking and type annotations; automatic generation of example messages with a single click; loading services using gRPC server reflection; cancelling a gRPC method any time; sending metadata; and viewing incoming metadata along with advanced streaming features, such as searching and filtering streamed messages, variable interpolation using environments, and synchronizing the proto files in the API with your repository on Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab, or Azure Repos.
The gRPC also allows importing, authoring, sharing, and inspecting Protobuf definitions with syntax highlighting and autocomplete.
The company will be making constant improvements towards integrating gRPC into the rest of the Postman ecosystem. These updates include adding documentation, scripting, testing, and every other feature. Developers can expect automatic documentation generation and code generation soon.
