[benpacker]

This seems great and I'm really excited to try it in place of trpc/orpc.

Although it seems to solve one of the problems that GraphQL solved that trpc doesn't (the ability to request nested information from items in a list or properties of an object without changes to server side code), there is no included solution for the server side problem that creates that the data loader pattern was intended to solve, where a naive GraphQL server implementation makes a database query per item in a list.

Until the server side tooling for this matures and has equivalents for the dataloader pattern, persisted/allowlist queries, etc., I'll probably only use this for server <-> server (worker <-> worker) or client <-> iframe communication and keep my client <-> server communication alongside more pre-defined boundaries.

[kentonv]

I generally agree that the .map() trick doesn't actually replace GraphQL without some sort of server-side optimizations to avoid turning this into N+1 selects.

However, if your database is sqlite in a Cloudflare Durable Object, and the RPC protocol is talking directly to it, then N+1 selects are actually just fine.

https://www.sqlite.org/np1queryprob.html

[ryanrasti]

Agree, and to add, from what I see, the main issue is that server-side data frameworks (e.g., ORMs) aren't generally built for the combination of security & composability that make them naturally synergize with Cap'n Web. Another way to put it: promise pipelining is a killer feature but if your ORM doesn't support pipelining, then you have to build a complex bridge to support them both.

I've been working on this issue from the other side. Specifically, a TS ORM that has the level of composability to make promise pipelining a killer feature out of the box. And analagous to Cap'n Web's use of classes, it even models tables as classes with methods that return composable SQL expressions.

If curious: https://typegres.com/play/

[qcnguy]

I wonder if there's a way to process the RPC encoding inside a stored procedure, using the various JS-in-DB features out there.