Communication Protocol on Apache Dubbo

RPC Communication Protocols Supported by Dubbo

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

As an RPC framework, Dubbo comes with efficient RPC communication protocols to solve encoding and communication issues between services. The currently supported protocols include:

triple, a high-performance communication protocol based on HTTP/1 and HTTP/2, 100% compatible with gRPC, supporting Unary, Streaming, and other communication patterns; supports publishing REST-style HTTP services.
dubbo, a high-performance private communication protocol based on TCP, with the drawback of poor universality, more suitable for use between Dubbo SDKs;
Any protocol extension, supports any RPC protocol through extended protocol, with official ecosystem libraries providing support for JsonRPC, thrift, etc.

Protocol Overview

Which protocol to use?

How should developers determine which protocol to use? Below is a comparative analysis of several mainstream protocols from the perspectives of usage scenarios, performance, ease of programming, and multi-language interoperability:

TCP-based RPC Communication Protocol - dubbo

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This example demonstrates how to develop services based on dubbo protocol communication, and you can view the full code of this example:

Note

To ensure compatibility with older versions, the default protocol for Dubbo 3.3.0 and earlier is dubbo. However, if you are a new user considering using Dubbo to build a brand-new microservices system, we recommend that you explicitly configure your application to use the triple protocol.

Running the Example

You can follow these steps to try running the example source code corresponding to this document.

Publishing REST-style Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The “rest protocol” discussed in this article is not a true protocol implementation, but rather a way to make the triple protocol support direct access via REST-style HTTP requests. We will demonstrate how to access Dubbo services using REST requests.

Note

Starting from Dubbo version 3.3, the REST protocol has been moved to the extensions library, with the triple protocol providing more comprehensive support for REST. The built-in protocol implementations now only include triple and dubbo.
Therefore, when we mention REST, we are referring to the REST access support capabilities of the triple protocol. For more details, see Triple REST User Manual

When discussing the triple protocol example, we mentioned that the triple protocol supports direct access in application/json format: