GWT deRPC to be Deprecated
Direct evaluate Remote Procedure Calls (deRPCs) in GWT seem to be promising approach to transfer objects from server to browser. Rather than encoding objects into a stream of text in a legacy format, deRPC sends objects as JavaScript statements from server to client.
However, after some time of working with it, two important reasons surfaced not to adopt this technology.
-1- deRPC does not work very well
I had a number of issues in using deRPC:
- While my test application ran fine in the hosted mode, I was not able to get it working deployed as a WAR onto tomcat and jetty. Debugging with Firebug reveals that the messages send from client to server are identical in hosted mode/deployed but the response send from the server was no JavaScript code in hosted mode (but only in deployed mode – which then was not read correctly by the server). I might of course have configured the whole project incorrectly, but I spent hours on the problem and did not get it fixed.
- The JavaScript generated by the server, which was sent over the wire (when the application was deployed in a servlet container), seemed to be very verbose.
-2- GWT deRPC is about to be depreacted by the Google GWT team
"DeRPC was created to help with large object graph serialization; however, DeRPC (NOT GWT-RPC) will likely be deprecated eventually in favor of RequestFactory." (David Chandler on Google Groups)