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Protocols

Zeebe clients connect to brokers via a stateless gateway.

For the communication between client and gateway, gRPC is used. The communication protocol is defined using Protocol Buffers v3 (proto3), and you can find it in the Zeebe repository.

What is gRPC?​

gRPC was first developed by Google and is now an open-source project and part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

If you’re new to gRPC, see What is gRPC on the project website for an introduction.

Why gRPC?​

gRPC has many beneficial features that make it a good fit for Zeebe, including the following:

  • Supports bi-directional streaming for opening a persistent connection and sending or receiving a stream of messages between client and server
  • Uses the common HTTP/2 protocol by default
  • Uses Protocol Buffers as an interface definition and data serialization mechanism–specifically, Zeebe uses proto3, which supports easy client generation in ten different programming languages.

Supported clients​

Currently, Zeebe officially supports two gRPC clients: one in Java, and one in Golang.

Community clients have been created in other languages, including C#, Ruby, and JavaScript.

If there is no client in your target language yet, you can build your own client in a range of different programming languages.

Intercepting calls​

Zeebe supports loading arbitrary gRPC server interceptors to intercept incoming calls.