Protocol Overview

As an RPC framework, Dubbo has an efficient built-in RPC communication protocol that helps solve coding and communication issues between services. The currently supported protocols include:

triple, a high-performance communication protocol based on HTTP/1 and HTTP/2, 100% compatible with gRPC, supporting Unary, Streaming, and other communication modes; allows publishing REST-style HTTP services.
dubbo, a high-performance private communication protocol based on TCP, with the drawback of lower general applicability, more suitable for use between Dubbo SDKs;
Any protocol extension, by extending protocol, any RPC protocol can be supported, with official ecosystem libraries providing support for JsonRPC, thrift, etc.

Protocol Selection

How should developers decide which protocol to use? The following is our comparative analysis of multiple mainstream protocols from aspects like use cases, performance, ease of programming, and multilingual interoperability:

Protocol	Performance	Gateway Friendly	Streaming	Multilingual Support	Programming API	Description
triple	High	High	Supports client stream, server stream, bidirectional stream	Supports (Java, Go, Node.js, JavaScript, Rust)	Java Interface, Protobuf(IDL)	The most balanced protocol implementation in terms of multilingual compatibility, performance, gateway, Streaming, gRPC, etc., recommended by the official team. Supports `application/json` formatted payload for direct HTTP access.
dubbo	High	Low	Not supported	Supports (Java, Go)	Java Interface	The highest performance private protocol, but has higher costs for frontend traffic access and multilingual support

Here is the specific development, configuration, and runtime information for the two main protocols, triple and dubbo:

Protocol Name	Configuration Value	Service Definition Methods	Default Port	Transport Layer Protocol	Serialization Protocol	Default
triple	tri	- Java Interface - Java Interface+SpringWeb Annotation - Java Interface+JaxRS Annotation - Protobuf(IDL)	50051	HTTP/1, HTTP/2	Protobuf Binary, Protobuf-json	No
dubbo	dubbo	- Java Interface	20880	TCP	Hessian, Fastjson2, JSON, JDK, Avro, Kryo, etc.	Yes

Note

Since version 3.3, the triple protocol supports publishing standard HTTP services in a REST style, so there is no longer an independent REST protocol extension implementation in the framework.
Considering compatibility with past versions, all current Dubbo release versions default to using the dubbo communication protocol. For new users, we strongly recommend clearly configuring the use of the triple protocol from the beginning, and existing users should refer to the documentation for a smooth migration of protocols as soon as possible.

Multi-Protocol Extensions

Below are the extension protocol implementations currently provided by the Dubbo official ecosystem. For information on extending more custom protocols, please refer to SPI extension manual or usage tutorial - protocol extension .

Protocol	Configuration Value	Description
Hessian	hessian	RPC communication protocol defined by Hessian, see Hessian Protocol for details
Spring HTTP	http	Private protocol based on HTTP defined by Spring, see Hessian Protocol for details
Apache Thrift	thrift	Thrift protocol known for its high performance and multilingual support, see Thrift Protocol for details
JsonRPC	jsonrpc	See JsonRPC for details
RMI	rmi	See RMI Protocol for details
WebService	webservice	See WebService Protocol for details

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Last modified September 30, 2024: Update & Translate Overview Docs (#3040) (d37ebceaea7)