For keeping focus only on gRPC, we'll set up the plain Maven-based project without any Spring or other dependencies and keep it simple. This will allow you to just concentrate on gRPC and teach you how easy it is to develop gRPC-based services. You will be surprised to know that a gRPC client just needs a single method with an auto-generated stub.
You will need to add Spring and other libraries to explore it more. There are already many third-party gRPC Spring starters. Out of them, I like https://github.com/yidongnan/grpc-spring-boot-starter. However, I would suggest using only the required Spring dependencies instead of Spring Boot, because gRPC offers its own embedded server (non-blocking I/O netty).
We'll create the service for the Employee entity with CRUD operations. You can take a reference and build whatever you want.
We'll complete...