Further Reading

Who is this for?

  • tRPC is for full-stack javascripters. It makes it dead easy to write “endpoints” which you safely use in your app.
  • It’s designed for monorepos as you need to export/import the type definitions from/to your server.
  • If you’re already in a team where you’re mixing languages or have third party consumers that you have no control of, you’re better off with making a GraphQL-API which is language-agnostic.

Relationship to GraphQL

If you already have a custom GraphQL-server for your project, you may not want to use tRPC. GraphQL is amazing; it’s great to be able to make a flexible API where each consumer can pick just the data they need.

The thing is, GraphQL isn’t that easy to get right - ACL is needed to be solved on a per-type basis, complexity analysis, and performance are all non-trivial things.

We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from GraphQL. If you’ve made GraphQL-servers before, you’ll be familiar with the concept of input types and resolvers.

tRPC is a lot simpler and couples your server & website/app more tightly together (for good and for bad). It makes it easy to move quickly, do changes without updating a schema & there’s no thinking about the ever-traversable graph.

Differences to Blitz.js

I’ve gotten asked several times about differences with Blitz.js and started outlining some differences on Twitter. If you think the below comparison is wrong in any way, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
— Alex / KATT

The philosophy of the “Zero-API data layer” is the main common denominator in tRPC & Blitz.

Blitz is a full-stack framework & achieves this by maintaining a fork of Next.js and adding it into core - resulting in a more integrated developer experience. tRPC is a set of libraries that mainly focuses on the API-layer that can be used with any app or framework, resulting in no framework lock-in of React or Blitz’s fork of Next.js.

Benefits with tRPC

  • Easy HTTP caching of queries as requests are made with GET rather than POST (Blitz is planning on adding support for this too)
  • Query batching out-of-the-box
  • Works great with React Native
  • Well-tested & production-ready
  • Not tied to React or Blitz’s fork of Next.js
  • Can be added to existing brownfield projects and adopted incrementally, regardless of stack
  • WebSockets transport
  • Subscription support
  • Zero-conf SSR with ssr: true in _app.tsx does a prepass of all useQuery on the server
  • Configurable data flow between client/server with links
  • Single API-endpoint which reduces amounts of cold starts in serverless environments

Benefits with Blitz.js

  • Data layer integrated with the Next.js runtime, resulting in a more integrated experience
  • Automatic integration with Blitz’s auth
  • Since you import server functions directly to the frontend, you can do things like CMD+click a function to jump to definition

Potential Collaboration between Blitz and tRPC

Toward the end of 2021, Blitz creator Brandon Bayer announced a major pivot to a framework agnostic toolkit. This lead to a proposal from Alex on ways for Blitz and tRPC to collaborate. Discussions around a potential integration with tRPC for the next iteration of Blitz has continued in [RFC] New Blitz Toolkit Standalone Zero API Data Layer.