Group items tagged

It is now the time to introduce the Model in GWT 2.1. The direction taken in 2.0.x has been pushed one step further, so that the Model is, in fact, only a Data Transfer Obejct (DTO). A DTO is an object whose main purpose is to be transferred, usually from one Tier to another Tier of a layered architecture such as Browser/Server/Database.

Value Store, the package that defines the Model/DTO programming interface.

Valuestore is the management interface that performs CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on the Records, like Entity Manager in JPA and Persistence Manager in JDO.

The first interface to discuss is Record, the base interface to implement to define a DTO class. A Record holds data for a single instance of an entity. Let's suppose that in your server-side business model there's an entity called 'Employee' to represent a company employee list.  To use it on the client side, you would need to define an EmployeeRecord class to hold the values of one of your employees, e.g. the employee name, birth date, etc.

A Record is able to provide values using Property objects as keys. The properties are type-aware, so that the employee name is a Property<String>, the employee birth data a Property<Date>, and so on. The following table reports these elements in a single example:

The Record interface doesn't provide a generic reflection mechanism, so it's not possible to inspect a Record to know what kind of Properties it is made of. The current implementation RecordImpl, which delegates to JavaScriptObject implementation and provides JSON serialization, is actually holding a schema of the record properties in a RecordSchema object.

note the annotation @DataTransferObject, that GWT uses to map the record to the equivalent server-side class. By declaring the connection, GWT is capable of binding automatically the interface properties with the JPA-annotated properties, thus greatly reducing the amount of boilerplate mapping work to be performed.

Of course, when you add or modify a property in your real Model, appropriate changes must be applied to the equivalent Record. That's where the teamwork with Spring Roo comes handy: Spring Roo generates and keeps aligned a lot of these elements, and would reflect (overwrite) your EmployeeRecord java file every time you change your domain model definition.

As a general rule, you are encouraged to define specific interface methods to extract data from you Record, e.g. getName() to get the Employee name. Record exposes also method to retrieve a value given a property. For instance, in a Renderer of a CellTree, when you are given an EmployeeRecord you should access its data through public getter methods.

The model-agnostic way that GWT uses to access a value is the Record.get(Property<V>) method. There's also a way to get not the value itself, but a PropertyReference<V>, which is just the property of a specific record, e.g. the Property 'name' of Record 'r2' in the example table above. In a few words, a property reference is just a value, which is exactly how Value<V> is defined. That is most useful to perform late bindings during RPC calls when the data is not yet available.

The DeltaValueStore is also worth mentioning a few words: as your model is now decomposed in Records and Properties, it is also possible to transfer only the data you need to. Hence the retrieval requests can dowload only a few properties of the Records. Furthermore, 'Update' operations can transmit back only the user changes (delta) instead of whole objects, which may give a nice performance boost.

To upgrade to 2.1 M1, simply do the following Download GWT 2.1 M1 from the download page and unpack it to the directory of your choice. If you use Eclipse to develop, you should also download the Google Plugin for Eclipse from the same download page. Update your GWT project build path to use the latest gwt-user.jar and gwt-dev.jar (and any other GWT jars that you included on your classpath). Replace references to gwt-dev-<platform>.jar with the location of the new gwt-dev.jar (there is no longer a platform specific suffix). Update any run configurations or application compile and shell scripts to include the latest JARs in the classpath (same JARs as mentioned in step 2). Run a GWT compilation over your project to generate the latest GWT application files for your project. Deploy the latest GWT application files to your web server.