Re: Recommendation for GWT and AppEngine communication

Thanks Thomas.  This insight is extremely helpful. 

On Tuesday, April 12, 2016 at 3:41:23 AM UTC-7, Thomas Broyer wrote:

On Monday, April 11, 2016 at 10:59:34 PM UTC+2, Paul Mazzuca wrote:

RestyGWT is enticing considering how well it decouples the client and the server.   Thanks.  I am still curious about a community (I guess I mean steering committee) recommendation though, especially if there are plans to update certain code like the RequestFactory.  Even if the steering committee recommends RestyGWT, that would be helpful because it would provide some stamp of approval for planning ahead as a developer. 

As far as AppEngine goes, I am putting together a sample codebase that I have used with GWT+RF+GAE+JDO. see https://github.com/mazook/gwt-starter.  After a few more updates I will start a new thread regarding the sample.

As much as I like RequestFactory, it must be noted that it's a really complex codebase (understand: hard to maintain), with a complex API; so I wouldn't actually recommend it for new projects.

I think the steering committee position is that one should use "other protocols" nowadays for new projects (not even GWT-RPC); mainly REST-like, but I hope Google will come up with a gRPC flavor that can be used in the browser.

JsInterop makes it really easy to build such REST-like JSON-based API clients, with zero-overhead on the client-side, and classes that can be reused on the server-side (just put JsInterop annotations along with Jackson/Gson/Moshi/etc. annotations; adds coupling but speeds-up prototyping, and it's easy to fully decouple later). If you want higher-level APIs, I'd go with Errai or Resty-GWT, or if I had a bit more time, I'd try to implement a Retrofit-like in GWT (reusing the Retrofit definition API so its portable, but generating an implementation, tailored for GWT, using an annotation processor).

There was a discussion (something like a year and a half ago, possibly even earlier) to come up with a new REST-like (web-friendly) API to replace GWT-RPC and RF. It never happened, and I don't think it'll ever happen: better have competing third-party libraries that people can choose from.

 

On Monday, April 11, 2016 at 12:13:25 PM UTC-7, Rogelio Flores wrote:

I'm using GWT + RestyGWT + Jersey (server-side for REST service definition) in my latest GWT app. I intend to use those tools + Objectify + JDO? for a new GWT-AppEngine app. Not sure about how it will work as I'm yet to get started with this toolchain, but I remember David Chandler writing about it a few years ago (I think he was with Google at the time, now with Sencha).

I find RESTful approach more flexible and probably the best choice if you want to call your services from a mobile app (RPC won't work in that case and RequestFactory might work but only with extra work).

I'll also welcome any pointers from people that have actually built GWT apps running on AppEngine.

On Sunday, April 10, 2016 at 7:58:17 PM UTC-6, Paul Mazzuca wrote:

Is GWT + RequestFactory + Google App Engine + JDO still considered a best practice (as suggested by the GWT docs), or is there a recommended alternative, assuming I would like to use GWT with AppEngine cloud datastore?

I have used this combination for a while, however the code is slowly becoming outdated without any signs of updates.  If I am building a new application with GWT and app engine, what suite of tools would best align me with future development?

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