Hi everybody,
Sorry for the late post. I was offline
On 07/26/12 16:31, Blake McBride wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I ran through the same issues. Spent quite a bit of time banging my
> head against the wall. (Still am!!) I sense a lot of GWT stuff is
> simple to those who already know HTML/JavaScript/CSS/JSP/etc.. They
> understand what is going on underneath, what the limitations are, and
> what common workarounds are. For those of us non-experts in the above
> technologies, GWT is very difficult. It seems to be filled with
> arbitrary limitations and arbitrary mechanisms. It is sad in a way
> because I believe GWT was meant to hide all that stuff. In spite of
> all these frustrations however, I have found GWT to be the best thing
> out there. HTML is the worst environment I've ever seen for writing
> interactive applications by far!
>
Couldn't put it better my self.
> Naturally, GWT includes a communications mechanism that works and is
> sufficient if you write the front-end and backend in GWT. There is no
> need for trying to use another mechanism - you'd be adding a lot of
> unnecessary work. On the other hand, if you already have an existing
> back-end and you are trying to link it up with a GWT front-end you
> need something else like SOAP. I spent a huge amount of time trying
> all sorts of ways to get this working with little success for a long
> time until I finally settled on something that worked well. What I
> did was use GWT to create the front-end and backend so that the two
> sides were communicating in native GWT. I then had the GWT backend
> create a socket connection with the real backend and communicate with
> it. I created all of the code to very easily form the socket
> connection and have the ability to bi-directionally communicate via
> named methods and arbitrary structured data. This can all be done
> without adding new classes for each communication (to specify the
> arguments). Another beauty of this is that the real server and the
> GWT server can be operating on different machines, different URL's,
> different ports, etc..
>
I am on a similar position right now. We are evaluating ways to bridge
SOAP and GWT. If you are using Apache-CXF as your GWT backend you could
use their javascript support and to JSNI from GWT to their client
javascript library (
http://cxf.apache.org/docs/javascript-clients.html).
Unfortunately in my case I can't use it because I have a strict
requirement for ws-security that cxf's generated javascript does not
support. So we are looking to build GWT RPC as middle end (as you
suggested) and maybe auto generate the java interface files.
> I offered the code to the GWT community before but there was no
> interest. I haven't spent the time to package up the code due to the
> lack of interest but if you want it I'd be happy to package it up and
> give it to you. Let me know.
>
I would be very interested to see how you solved this problem.
Thanks
Vassilis Virvilis