In today’s fast-paced world, where everything is moving towards automation and efficiency, tRPC offers a solution for building reliable, type-safe APIs that can be used in a wide range of real-time scenarios.
In this post, let’s explore some of the most common real-time scenarios where tRPC is used daily. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or someone who is just getting started with TypeScript and remote procedure calls, it will provide you with valuable information on the world of tRPC and its use cases.
We will look at different sectors and industries where computer science is used, such as finance, health care, e-commerce, and more. We will also explore the advantages of using tRPC compared to other RPC frameworks and how it can help developers build better, more robust applications.
What is tRPC?
tRPC (Typed RPC) is a modern framework for building efficient, type-safe remote procedure call (RPC) systems. It focuses on providing a type-safe API for communication between client and server applications, which helps catch errors at compile-time rather than runtime. TypeScript interference makes communication between the back-end and front end more productive. tRPC is not a scheme but a protocol (or “method”) for exposing back-end functionality to the front-end.
Why tRPC?
- tRPC aimed at full-stack TypeScript developers
- It allows users to write end-to-end type-safe APIs without any code generation or runtime bloat
- API contract type errors are detected at authoring time, reducing the attack surface for runtime API contract errors
- It allows the sharing of types between the client and server and imports the types, not the actual server code
- The server code is hidden from the front-end
Features
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- Complete static-type safety and automatic filling on the customer for input, output, and errors
- Include type-safe observability in your application and easy to begin or add to your brownfield project
- The tRPC community is building adapters for all the most popular frames
- Thoroughly tested and ready for production
Languages Supported for tRPC
Server-side
- Express
- Fastify
- Next JS
- Koa
- Deno
Client-side
- React
- Vue.js
- Angular
- Svelte
- Vanilla JavaScript
The server-side code can be written in any language that can run JavaScript, such as Node.js, Deno, or browser JavaScript. Therefore, tRPC built using TypeScript, can support multiple programming languages for client and server implementations.
Some of the Real-time Scenarios
Here are a few real-time scenarios where tRPC can be used:
- Collaborative real-time applications: You can use TRPC to create collaborative real-time applications. With tRPC, clients can make RPCs to the server to send messages or collaborate on documents.
- Microservices architecture: In a microservices architecture, services often need to communicate with each other over a network. TRPC can be used to make these remote procedure calls between services while leveraging TypeScript’s type system to ensure type safety.
- Single-page applications: Single-page applications (SPAs) rely heavily on client-side JavaScript to make API requests to the server. TRPC can be used to simplify this process by providing a type-safe interface for making RPCs to the server.
- Gaming applications: Gaming applications often require real-time communication between clients and servers. TRPC can implement game logic on the server and provide a type-safe interface for clients to make RPCs to the server.
TRPC is a versatile library that can be used in many scenarios where clients need to communicate with servers over a network.
Pros
- Very lightweight alternative to Graph QL
- End-to-end type-safety
- Easy to build
- High performance
Cons
- Limited Language support
- Coupling between server and client
Conclusion
tRPC is the most modern and simple way to build an API in projects, allowing developers to benefit from the combination of type safety, automatic code generation, and a straightforward API definition process. Its type-safe APIs and support for multiple communication protocols make it an ideal choice for building robust and scalable APIs.
