Saturday, May 12, 2007

Google Web Toolkit, Spring and Hibernate

Following on from the previous post, I've been trying to create some new GWT apps using that latest integration libraries, widgets and so on.

Previously there were some issues with trying to get GWT and Hibernate to play nice (Hibernate required Serializable, lazy-loading caused havoc, and there was manual work to map your objects), but a new library has been developed to semi-transparently map between Hibernate objects (complete with lazy-loading, etc) and objects capable of being serialized over the wire to GWT client apps. The only piece missing from here is a Spring interceptor to wrap around the service which would be able to transparently do this - I may have a crack at that myself.

So the list of libraries for my current GWT applications is:


Spring - General application framework providing IoC, DI, AOP, and many other services for both general and web applications
Hibernate - Generic ORM solution. Probably the best of the current crop - integrates as an EJB3 persistance provider as well.
Google Web Toolkit - Browser client-side application development framework, including AJAX functionality
Rocket-GWT - Lots of client-side GWT widgets here
gwt-widget-server - Provides easy integration between Spring and GWT for the service layer functions

Hiberate4GWT - Provides easy integration between your GWT POJOs and Hibernate POJOs

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