Re: RPC vs. RequestFactory vs. RestyGWT

I have been using RequestFactory extensively for a project and I must say that although it is pretty well engineered, the learning curve is quite high. 
If you have a CRUD heacy application where you send and receive lots of data, it might be a good solution (because it only sends deltas). 

However there are also some pain points: For example on the server side it uses Reflection to initialize the server instances which is slower than if the code would be generated. 

Also currently there is no real further development ongoing (apart from some bugfixes). 

Another downside is that there is really strong coupling between backend and frontend with RF. 

In many cases you might need a public API to access the data from non GWT clients, so you might end up implementing two endpoints (RF and REST). 

If I would start again I probably would choose REST over RF just because it clearly separates frontend from backend. 

 

On Thursday, October 16, 2014 12:15:55 PM UTC+2, Ralf Klemmer wrote:

I've used RPC, RequestFactory and now RestyGWT in some GWT projects.

In my opinion RequestFactory development should be canceled and replaced by RestyGWT (or something like that).

My key arguments for that drastic opinion:

RPC

+ easy to learn

- proprietary

- problems when trying to send hierarchical entities over the wire

- mostly leads to DTOs, which leads to boilerplate code for mapping DTOs and entities, which leads to hardly maintainable code if you have to deal with hierarchical objects (e.g. entity A contains entity B which contains list of entity C)

RequestFactory

- proprietary

- high learning curve

- bad documentation (almost every is very old)

- development is slow (compared to other techniques)

-  boilerplate code

+ "standard" GWT communication

+ integration with Editor framework

+ transfer of data delta between client and server

RestyGWT

- no official part of the GWT framework and the potential risk of development cancelation

+ really, really easy

+ Java standard

+ great documentation (client side on RestyGWT site, server side on RestyGWT and every other REST documentation)

+ out-of-the-box accessible by any other device that can handle rest services

+ nearly no boilerplate code

What's your opinion about that? Is RequestFactory the "right" way or not? What are your experiences?

I'm looking forward to your answers,

Ralf

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