Skip to content
AEP

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between aep.dev and google.aip.dev?

As aep.dev is derived from google.aip.dev, a lot of content will be familiar.

However, aep.dev has significant philosophical differences:

  • aep.dev prioritizes broadly applicable design guidance, while google.aip.dev prioritizes design guidance this best for Google, such as guidance that is backwards-compatible with existing decisions at the company.
  • aep.dev is protocol-agonistic, and considers gRPC and HTTP + JSON as first-class protocols for which examples and other content will be authored.
  • google.aip.dev encourages forking the guidance, while aep.dev focuses on a set of core specification that should not be forked, paired with a method to add organization-specific guidance that does not contradict the specification.

aep.dev also has the advantage of hindsight, which makes it possible in some cases to provide better guidance than google.aip.dev. (One small example: renaming page_size to max_page_size for requests to paginated API methods.)