gwt

GWT Object Serialization with gwt-storage

Max Rohde

Nov 27, 2013 — 2 min read

Problem

The built in Java Serialization and various serialization frameworks available for Java allow to serialize Java objects conveniently into binary or textual representations. Unfortunately, most of these frameworks are not available for Google Web Toolkit client applications.

There is no easily available built in solution for serializing GWT objects into text on the GWT client side. This is surprising since GWT evidently has a mechanism to serialize and deserialize objects to support GWT RPC.

Solution

Seanchenxi has kindly created a convenient wrapper around the GWT RPC serialization mechanism, which makes it very easy to serialize and deserialize objects on a GWT client application into String representations. The project, gwt-storage, is available on github:

https://github.com/seanchenxi/gwt-storage

You can download the source code and import it to your Java project. I've also uploaded the project to a public Maven repository. You can add it to your Maven project as follows:



<dependencies>

<dependency>

<groupId>com.seanchenxi.gwt</groupId>

<artifactId>gwt-storage</artifactId>

<version>1.2</version>

</dependency>

</dependencies>

…

<repositories>

<repository>

<id>Appjangle</id>

<url>http://maven.appjangle.com/appjangle/releases/</url>

</repository>

</repositories>

With gwt-storage available for your project, you can do the following in GWT client side code:



StorageSerializer serializerImpl = new com.seanchenxi.gwt.storage.client.serializer.StorageRPCSerializerImpl();

try {

MyClass obj = new MyClass("1234");

String serialized = serializerImpl.serialize(Serializable.class, obj);

GWT.log("Serialized Object: "+serialized);

MyClass deserialized = (MyClass) serializerImpl.deserialize(

Serializable.class, serialized);

} catch (SerializationException e) {

throw new RuntimeException(e);

}

Note:

If you download the gwt-storage source code, you might have to change the visibility of the class StorageRPCSerializerImpl() to public (from package).
MyClass needs to be serializable by GWT RPC; that is, implement Serializable and have non-transient references that are Serializable as well.
If you change the implementation of the class MyClass, deserialization of Strings created with older versions of the class will probably not be possible.