grpcui

For GUI, I've been very happy with grpcui-web[0]. It really highlights the strengths of GRPC: you get a full list of available operations (either from the server directly if it exposes metadata, or by pointing to the .proto file if not), since everything is strongly typed you get client-side field validation and custom controls e.g. a date picker for timestamp types or drop-down for enums. The experience is a lot better than copy & pasting from docs for trying out JSON-HTTP APIs. In general though I agree devex for gRPC is poor. I primarily work with the Python and Go APIs and they can be very frustrating. Basic operations like "turn pbtypes.Timestamp into a Python datetime or Go time.Time" are poorly documented and not obvious. proto3 removing `optional` was a flub and then adding it back was an even bigger flub; I have a bunch of protos

Looks very nice; I've also given up with Postman. gRPC support would probably get Bruno into my daily workflow immediately. I spent a couple hours in Postman trying to get gRPC to work and could not- the .proto files were never used successfully, and I ended up having better experiences with Kreya [0] and grpcui [1]. [0] https://kreya.app/ [1] https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcui

Pretty cool, but if you like a gui, I'd highly recommend https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcui, lightweight and super easy to use

You can see that reflection in action through tools like grpcui: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcui

I've been using https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcui + Paw so I hope that Paw catches up and also adds gRPC support. Definitely a good decision to have everything in one tool.

In general, not nearly as mature. In general though, gRPC is not for browser->server calls (grpc-web notwithstanding) but is designed for server<->server communication. There is some tooling out there for development (https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl and https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcui are pretty nice) but it's still much less mature than the massive amount of mature tooling available for HTTP-based services. And that is both an artifact of gRPCs relative youth compared to REST and also for some more fundamental reasons (binary wire format, mutual TLS based authentication, etc). All that said, I've been working with gRPC over the past 6 months or so and overall the development experience is much nicer on net I think.