[Sorry if this gets duped; got 502 error from Groups posting UI....]

"BTW: The reason the server couldn't simply send the client a
directly-evalable string is that the server doesn't know the
obfuscated
symbol names of the various fields and constructors.  If the server
DID know
those symbols, we could probably make deserialization an order of
magnitude
faster.  But that's a separate discussion. :)"

This thread is that separate discussion!

Why can't the server know the obfuscated symbols on the client?  Is it
to prevent the server from having to be aware of what client-side
compilation mode was used?  Could there be some kind of dictionary
that the GWT generator builds, that could be put on the server's
classpath as a resource, and loaded (if present) to enable server-side
direct-eval response construction?

The key questions are:
1) is this breaking some important information hiding that you want to
maintain over the wire?
2) how large would the performance increase actually be?
3) is this moving in the direction of something like a generic JSON-
ish wire format that would let the server part of GWT RPC be used by
NON-GWT clients?????????

Cheers!
Rob