TL;DR

gRPC TL;DR gRPC system initially developed at Google in 2015 for internal use. It is open-sourced in 2016. gRPC is an open-source remote procedure call (RPC) framework. gRPC is used for a server to server or client to server communication. gRPC is preferred when you need low latency, highly scalable and distributed system. Most common use case of gRPC is to communication between microservices. It can also use in mobile and desktop application to communicate with Server.

ProtocolBuffer TL;DR Protocol buffers are a language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. Protocol buffers are also known as protobuf Protocol buffers are developed by Google for internal use. It is available for the public in 2008. Protobuf is binary serialize protocol, unlike JSON and XML which are text-based human-readable protocol. It’s non-human-readable because of binary serialize. Apache Thrift, Ion, Fast Buffers, FlatBuffers, Cap’n Proto, SBE (Simple Binary Encoding) are some of the alternatives of Protocol Buffers.

GraphQL — TL;DR Facebook develops GraphQL in 2015. On 7 November 2018, the GraphQL project was moved from Facebook to the newly-established GraphQL Foundation. Lee Byron https://leebyron.com/ is co-creator of GraphQL at Facebook GraphQL is a data query and manipulation language for APIs. It can be alternative to REST API or co-exist with REST API GraphQL is not a query language of GraphDB but you can use GraphDB with GraphQL.