Striking the Balance: Comparing REST and RPC for Unleashing Low Latency in Web Applications (2024)

In the realm of web application development, achieving low latency and high performance is a critical goal. Two popular architectural styles for designing communication protocols in distributed systems are REST (Representational State Transfer) and RPC (Remote Procedure Call). This article delves into evaluating the suitability of REST and RPC in the context of building low latency web applications, exploring their features, benefits, and considerations.

REST

REST has gained significant popularity due to its simplicity, scalability, and compatibility with the HTTP protocol. When it comes to low latency web applications, REST offers several advantages:

1. Statelessness: REST's stateless nature eliminates the need for maintaining session state on the server, reducing overhead and improving response times.
2. Caching: REST leverages HTTP caching mechanisms, enabling the client to cache resources and reduce server round-trips. This leads to improved latency and overall performance.
3. Asynchronous Operations: REST allows asynchronous operations through the use of non-blocking requests or background tasks, which can help mitigate latency for long-running or computationally intensive operations.
4. Parallelism: REST supports parallelism by allowing clients to make multiple requests concurrently. This can enhance performance by leveraging the capabilities of modern browsers and network infrastructure.

RPC

RPC is a communication protocol that focuses on invoking remote procedures or methods. While it has distinct characteristics from REST, RPC can also be suitable for low latency web applications due to the following reasons:

1. Efficiency: RPC is known for its efficiency and low overhead. By directly invoking remote methods, RPC can offer faster response times compared to other protocols, making it well-suited for applications where latency is a primary concern.
2. Language-Specific Proxies: RPC often uses language-specific libraries or code generation tools to generate client proxies, allowing for seamless communication between client and server. This tight coupling can reduce latency by avoiding unnecessary protocol parsing or conversions.
3. Customized Protocols: RPC protocols can be tailored for specific use cases, optimizing them for low latency. By choosing a binary format for data serialization and implementing protocol-level optimizations, RPC can provide superior performance in certain scenarios.

Considerations and Trade-offs

While both REST and RPC offer benefits for low latency web applications, it's important to consider the trade-offs associated with each approach:

1. Flexibility vs. Efficiency: REST's flexible and resource-oriented nature allows for loose coupling and evolvability but may introduce additional overhead compared to RPC's tighter coupling and direct method invocations.
2. Standardization vs. Customization: REST leverages standardized HTTP methods and formats, promoting interoperability and ease of integration. RPC, on the other hand, can be customized to fit specific application requirements, potentially achieving better performance but at the cost of standardization.
3. Protocol Complexity: REST's simplicity makes it easy to understand and adopt. In contrast, RPC protocols often require specialized knowledge and may have a steeper learning curve.

Examples of Web Applications Where REST can be Used

1. Social Media Platform: A RESTful architecture is well-suited for building social media platforms where users can create, read, update, and delete posts, profiles, and interactions. Resources such as users, posts, comments, and likes can be accessed and manipulated using standard HTTP methods.
2. E-commerce Website: REST is commonly used in e-commerce applications for managing product catalogs, shopping carts, and user profiles. Clients can interact with resources such as products, orders, and payments through RESTful APIs, making it easy to integrate with various client applications.
3. Content Management System (CMS): RESTful APIs are employed in CMS platforms to enable content creation, retrieval, and management. Resources like articles, images, categories, and tags can be accessed and modified using RESTful endpoints, allowing clients to interact with the CMS.
4. IoT (Internet of Things) Application: RESTful services are often utilized to control and monitor IoT devices. Clients can communicate with devices by sending HTTP requests to RESTful APIs, enabling actions such as retrieving sensor data, controlling actuators, and managing device configurations.

Examples of Web Applications Where RPC can be Used

1. Financial Services Application: RPC can be used in financial services applications where real-time transaction processing and communication with backend systems are crucial. RPC enables efficient communication between the front-end application and the banking or payment systems, ensuring low latency and high performance.
2. Online Gaming Platform: In online gaming, RPC can be employed for real-time interactions between game clients and servers. This allows for quick and efficient communication during multiplayer gameplay, enabling fast-paced actions and minimizing latency.
3. Stock Trading Platform: RPC can be utilized in stock trading platforms where timely and accurate information exchange is essential. RPC calls can enable fast retrieval of stock quotes, execution of trades, and communication with market data providers.
4. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System: ERP systems often involve complex interactions between different modules and databases. RPC can be employed to facilitate communication between these modules, allowing for efficient data retrieval, updates, and integration between various components.

It's worth noting that while these examples highlight typical use cases for REST and RPC, the choice between them ultimately depends on factors such as specific application requirements, performance considerations, and the level of flexibility and standardization needed.