GWT & object serialization

When writing GWT business applications you have the problem that the object graph resided at the server has to be partially send to the browser/client, (perhaps) updated and send back.

A though problem to crack is how to break the graph in pieces. After all, we do not want to send the entire database from the server to the client. This is similar to the problem that Hibernate solves when communicating with the database. Hibernate will load on-demand needed objects from the database. Hibernate will also optimize the updates to the database.

I think it is key to have something similar to Hibernate for the GWT arena. Instead of manually loading additional objects a framework should handle this.

A key difference is that (in most cases) the Hibernate instance is a singleton, thus allowing caching techniques. Caching at the browser is tricky since other clients can have updated the data.

My hope was that a framework like XSTM would solve this problem. The sad things it that it uses code generation. I'm not in favor of code generation and especially not when it involves the domain objects. Reason is that it makes the usage of the library very intrusive through your entire application. Advantage of code generation in this case instead of byte code manipulation is of course that it runs in GWT.

Anyway when I look at the sample the objects replicated are stored in a share, which is a generic container and thus requiring a lot of casting. My idea that you could retrieve objects with a query kind of language is not the case, you have to manually put in the share and get it out. So this solution will work well for games I suspect - but not for business applications with huge databases. In this case you have to write code at client side to notify the server which objects to put in the share. Again plumming that I hoped the framework would fix. Looks like that XSTM requires an additional layer of abstraction on top of it that will make it hide the clouds/shares and just work with regular objects.