- GWTcon2017
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Ideas
+7
If GWT-RPC will not be part of GWT 3 then what should we use today instead of it ?
Is there any solution that is future proof today or at least recommended to switch (that does not use Generators or that have a plan to replace it with APT) that can replace GWT-RPC in functionality (to be as fast and easy to serialize any complex model e.g. JPA classes with lists/sets/maps of other objects that have lists/sets/maps of some other objects..., any primitive or complex type like BigDecimal)?
Customer support service by UserEcho
A great question... and one I intend to discuss on day two of the conference in my talk "In Defense of GWT-RPC"!
We are only using RESTful in our GWT projects, RestyGWT. IMHO today you have to offer APIs in your systems and using RESTful you can support both your APIs and your GWT clients.
I do use restful too over restyGwt, and works great when you are dealing with simple data structures using simple datatypes, but when it comes to complex datatypes it does not perform good, for example, with RPC you got polymorphic types out of the box and there is nothing you need to to, with rest you still need to teach your application about these polymorphic types, its doable but with extra work, then comes other long list of datatypes that not well supported by rest like dates, bigdecimals, enums, maps....etc, RPC in this is much more powerful and type safe, and provides a stronger contract, it might have problem but it also has lots of strength in it.
It is great to hear that there will be a talk about GWT-RPC! There are many use cases where I use RESTful, but for the communication between client and server on GWT I still prefer GWT-RPC. It is easy to use and it handles a lot of work that a developer would not like to do (or would do it incompletely).
Clearly there is criticism around GWT-RPC, but the arguments do not sound reasonable. RESTful is naturally an alternative, but GWT-RPC has been very important for GWT. Will it change?
@Diogo, I should have let you write the intro to my talk. If you'll be at the conference, you'll get to hear all about how much I think you are on the right track, and if not, I'll publish some of my preliminary work at some point after I speak, so others can explore it.
I will unfortunately not be at the conference. Will there be a chance to join it online? Even if only for watching, it would be great!
Good luck on that, Colin! There will certainly be many GWT-RPC supporters at the conference. I would be very interested in checking your work.
The venue doesn't have the bandwidth to stream the talks unfortunately. I will share my slides after the conf and a short vacation, and will also be sure to upload my sample work to github. In past years, the videos were available some months later, I'd expect it by January? No promises though, it is a lot of work.