Useful Utilities

gRPC UI

gRPC UI is exceptionally useful for exploring the Toolkit Services.

Each service is self-describing, so you only need to connect to the service on the gRPC port, and create calls using a web browser.

For example, connecting to the Session Service on the default port:

grpcui -plaintext localhost:2652

Postman and Insomnia

Postman is a convenient tool and popular tool for testing REST web services — such as the RTA API.

Insomnia is a popular alternative.

httpstat

httpstat is useful for benchmarking — particularly when developing a Data Service.

httpstat -H "Accept: application/vnd.mat.protobuf+chunked" -o output.bin http://localhost/rta/v2/sessions/abc123/data/timestamped/0-7f

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Kestrel
Content-Type: application/vnd.mat.protobuf+chunked
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:16:59 GMT

Body read

   DNS Lookup   TCP Connection   Server Processing   Content Transfer
[       0ms  |           5ms  |            396ms  |         14388ms  ]
             |                |                   |                  |
    namelookup:0ms            |                   |                  |
                        connect:5ms               |                  |
                                      starttransfer:402ms            |
                                                                 total:14790ms

Protocol Buffers Compiler

protoc will generate idiomatic data classes and serializers in a range of languages.

Tip

If you are working in .NET, Visual Studio has integrated support for compiling protobuf as part of your project.

This works very well and is highly recommended.