When should I use RequestFactory vs GWT-RPC?

I am trying to figure out if I should migrate my gwt-rpc calls to the new GWT2.1 RequestFactory cals.

Google documentation vaguely mentions that RequestFactory is a better client-server communication method for "data-oriented services"

What I can distill from the documentation is that there is a new Proxy class that simplifies the communication (you don't pass back and forth the actual entity but just the proxy, so it is lighter weight and easier to manage)

Is that the whole point or am I missing something else in the big picture?

The big difference between GWT RPC and RequestFactory is that the RPC system is "RPC-by-concrete-type" while RequestFactory is "RPC-by-interface".

RPC is more convenient to get started with, because you write fewer lines of code and use the same class on both the client and the server. You might create a Person class with a bunch of getters and setters and maybe some simple business logic for further slicing-and-dicing of the data in the Person object. This works quite well until you wind up wanting to have server-specific, non-GWT-compatible, code inside your class. Because the RPC system is based on having the same concrete type on both the client and the server, you can hit a complexity wall based on the capabilities of your GWT client.

To get around the use of incompatible code, many users wind up creating a peer PersonDTO that shadows the real Person object used on the server. The PersonDTO just has a subset of the getters and setters of the server-side, "domain", Person object. Now you have to write code that marshalls data between the Person and PersonDTO object and all other object types that you want to pass to the client.

RequestFactory starts off by assuming that your domain objects aren't going to be GWT-compatible. You simply declare the properties that should be read and written by the client code in a Proxy interface, and the RequestFactory server components take care of marshaling the data and invoking your service methods. For applications that have a well-defined concept of "Entities" or "Objects with identity and version", the EntityProxy type is used to expose the persistent identity semantics of your data to the client code. Simple objects are mapped using the ValueProxy type.

With RequestFactory, you pay an up-front startup cost to accommodate more complicated systems than GWT RPC easily supports. RequestFactory's ServiceLayer provides significantly more hooks to customize its behavior by adding ServiceLayerDecorator instances.

I went through a transition from RPC to RF. First I have to say my experience is limited in that, I used as many EntityProxies as 0.

Advantages of GWT RPC:

• It's very easy to set-up, understand and to LEARN!
• Same class-based objects are used on the client and on the server.
• This approach saves tons of code.
• Ideal, when the same model objects (and POJOS) are used on either client and server, POJOs == MODEL OBJECTs == DTOs
• Easy to move stuff from the server to client.
• Easy to share implementation of common logic between client and server (this can turn out as a critical disadvantage when you need a different logic).

Disadvatages of GWT RPC:

• Impossible to have different implementation of some methods for server and client, e.g. you might need to use different logging framework on client and server, or different equals method.
• REALLY BAD implementation that is not further extensible: most of the server functionality is implemented as static methods on a RPC class. THAT REALLY SUCKS.
• e.g. It is impossible to add server-side errors obfuscation
• Some security XSS concerns that are not quite elegantly solvable, see docs (I am not sure whether this is more elegant for RequestFactory)

Disadvantages of RequestFactory:

• REALLY HARD to understand from the official doc, what's the merit of it! It starts right at completely misleading term PROXIES - these are actually DTOs of RF that are created by RF automatically. Proxies are defined by interfaces, e.g. @ProxyFor(Journal.class). IDE checks if there exists corresponding methods on Journal. So much for the mapping.
• RF will not do much for you in terms of commonalities of client and server because
• On the client you need to convert "PROXIES" to your client domain objects and vice-versa. This is completely ridiculous. It could be done in few lines of code declaratively, but there's NO SUPPORT FOR THAT! If only we could map our domain objects to proxies more elegantly, something like JavaScript method JSON.stringify(..,,) is MISSING in RF toolbox.
• Don't forget you are also responsible for setting transferable properties of your domain objects to proxies, and so on recursively.
• POOR ERROR HANDLING on the server and - Stack-traces are omitted by default on the server and you re getting empty useless exceptions on the client. Even when I set custom error handler, I was not able to get to low-level stack traces! Terrible.
• Some minor bugs in IDE support and elsewhere. I filed two bug requests that were accepted. Not an Einstein was needed to figure out that those were actually bugs.
• DOCUMENTATION SUCKS. As I mentioned proxies should be better explained, the term is MISLEADING. For the basic common problems, that I was solving, DOCS IS USELESS. Another example of misunderstanding from the DOC is connection of JPA annotations to RF. It looks from the succinct docs that they kinda play together, and yes, there is a corresponding question on StackOverflow. I recommend to forget any JPA 'connection' before understanding RF.

Advantages of RequestFactory

• Excellent forum support.
• IDE support is pretty good (but is not an advantage in contrast with RPC)
• Flexibility of your client and server implementation (loose coupling)
• Fancy stuff, connected to EntityProxies, beyond simple DTOs - caching, partial updates, very useful for mobile.
• You can use ValueProxies as the simplest replacement for DTOs (but you have to do all not so fancy conversions yourself).
• Support for Bean Validations JSR-303.

Considering other disadvantages of GWT in general:

• Impossible to run integration tests (GWT client code + remote server) with provided JUnit support <= all JSNI has to be mocked (e.g. localStorage), SOP is an issue.

• No support for testing setup - headless browser + remote server <= no simple headless testing for GWT, SOP.

• Yes, it is possible to run selenium integration tests (but that's not what I want)

• JSNI is very powerful, but at those shiny talks they give at conferences they do not talk much about that writing JSNI codes has some also some rules. Again, figuring out how to write a simple callback was a task worth of true researcher.

In summary, transition from GWT RPC to RequestFactory is far from WIN-WIN situation, when RPC mostly fits your needs. You end up writing tons conversions from client domain objects to proxies and vice-versa. But you get some flexibility and robustness of your solution. And support on the forum is excellent, on Saturday as well!

Considering all advantages and disadvantages I just mentioned, it pays really well to think in advance whether any of these approaches actually brings improvement to your solution and to your development set-up without big trade-offs.

I find the idea of creating Proxy classes for all my entities quite annoying. My Hibernate/JPA pojos are auto-generated from the database model. Why do I now need to create a second mirror of those for RPC? We have a nice "estivation" framework that takes care of "de-hibernating" the pojos.

Also, the idea of defining service interfaces that don't quite implement the server side service as a java contract but do implement the methods - sounds very J2EE 1.x/2.x to me.

Unlike RequestFactory which has poor error handling and testing capabilities (since it processes most of the stuff under the hood of GWT), RPC allows you to use a more service oriented approach. RequestFactory implements a more modern dependency injection styled approach that can provide a useful approach if you need to invoke complex polymorphic data structures. When using RPC your data structures will need to be more flat, as this will allow your marshaling utilities to translate between your json/xml and java models. Using RPC also allows you to implement more robust architecture, as quoted from the gwt dev section on Google's website.

"Simple Client/Server Deployment

The first and most straightforward way to think of service definitions is to treat them as your application's entire back end. From this perspective, client-side code is your "front end" and all service code that runs on the server is "back end." If you take this approach, your service implementations would tend to be more general-purpose APIs that are not tightly coupled to one specific application. Your service definitions would likely directly access databases through JDBC or Hibernate or even files in the server's file system. For many applications, this view is appropriate, and it can be very efficient because it reduces the number of tiers.

Multi-Tier Deployment

In more complex, multi-tiered architectures, your GWT service definitions could simply be lightweight gateways that call through to back-end server environments such as J2EE servers. From this perspective, your services can be viewed as the "server half" of your application's user interface. Instead of being general-purpose, services are created for the specific needs of your user interface. Your services become the "front end" to the "back end" classes that are written by stitching together calls to a more general-purpose back-end layer of services, implemented, for example, as a cluster of J2EE servers. This kind of architecture is appropriate if you require your back-end services to run on a physically separate computer from your HTTP server."

Also note that setting up a single RequestFactory service requires creating around 6 or so java classes where as RPC only requires 3. More code == more errors and complexity in my book.

RequestFactory also has a little bit more overhead during the request processing, as it has to marshal serialization between the data proxies and actual java models. This added interface adds extra processing cycles which can really add up in an enterprise or production environment.

I also do not believe that RequestFactory services are serialization like RPC services.

All in all after using both for some time now, i always go with RPC as its more lightweight, easier to test and debug, and faster then using a RequestFactory. Although RequestFactory might be more elegant and extensible then its RPC counter part. The added complexity does not make it a better tool necessary.

My opinion is that the best architecture is to use two web apps , one client and one server. The server is a simple lightweight generic java webapp that uses the servlet.jar library. The client is GWT. You make RESTful request via GWT-RPC into the server side of the client web application. The server side of the client is just a pass though to apache http client which uses a persistant tunnel into the request handler you have running as a single servlet in your server servlet web application. The servlet web application should contain your database application layer (hibernate, cayenne, sql etc..) This allows you to fully divorce the database object models from the actual client providing a much more extensible and robust way to develop and unit test your application. Granted it requires a tad bit of initial setup time, but in the end allows you to create a dynamic request factory sitting outside of GWT. This allows you to leverage the best of both worlds. Not to mention being able to test and make changes to your server side without having to have the gwt client compiled or build.