Interacting with servlet containers

[Howard Bell]

Hi, I'm new to GWT, and I'm currently trying to architect what we hope
will be a webscale application. GWT seems to meet our requirements for
developing the browser application, but seems to be weak in it's
interaction and data binding with back end services other than a GWT
Java Servlets.

Since we have ruled any form of server side java out of our designs
(for obvious webscaling reasons). This seems to leave us with the
following choices for back end (stateless) services:

a) Traditional web services.
Pro's: c++ based (fast), interacts with Oracle Database
well, scales well, takes advantage of advanced oracle
features such as client side result cache. Will be
consistent with back end web services we need to
provide as client API's.

Con's: Looks like a lot of hand crafting is needed in GWT to
interact with traditional services, parse them, bind
them to widgets etc.

b) c++ Servlet container.
Pro's: Same as above

Con's: Not 100% it can be done with GWT, not sure if there
is a good free web scalable c++ servlet
container out there.

I'd be very interested in peoples opinions on whether i've grasped all
the GWT options, understood the effort required to bind with non gwt
services correctly, or indeed anyone with any experience of getting
GWT to interact with non GWT services, is it as painfull as it looks?

[Joseph Lust]

Howard,

You can write your front in GWT via Java, and then interact with any backend you fancy. There are plenty of these tutorials out there to interact with other languages like PHP backends using a JSON calls. See the docs.

It sounds like you are deadset on C++, which you could do with a JSON service and RequestBuilder. However, you might want to consider using a Java backend still. This works for Google and their properties on AppEngine, which scales well. You can even deploy with one click from Eclipse. Sticking with a Java backend will allow you to automate all of the boilerplate plumbing using RPC, which is also far more efficient (size wise) than JSON REST.

Hope that helps. Good luck with your project.

Sincerely,

Joseph