Thomas and Paul,
 
Thanks for all the info, I will certainly look into these alternatives. 
 
The only problem is that somehow GWT should include a fast generic RPC 
mechanism. I hate having to depend on 3rd party alternatives that are often 
writen by one individual to solve his own issue and never maintained. I am 
writing banking software and we have some strict requirements on what 
products we are allowed to use since we have some very tight end-user 
licenses that requires us to fix issues very quickly. 
 
But somehow RPC is fundamental to AJAX apps build on GWT and it is a shame 
that we have almost no support for JSON-REST kind of APIs since that is 
what most people seem to be using.
 
David

On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 5:17:33 PM UTC+1, Thomas Broyer wrote:

>
>
> On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 4:37:35 PM UTC+1, stuckagain wrote: 
>>
>> Hi,
>>  
>> Not sure where to ask this question, but I was wondering if the GWT devs 
>> every plan to fix the inefficient GWT-RPC ?
>> The problem happens mostly on IE (all versions), although I assume other 
>> browsers might benefit as well since a lot of cpu cycles are wasted on 
>> things that should be trivial for a browser.
>>  
>> I had to improve multiple GWT apps that all stumble on these 3 problems:
>> - deserialisation is terribly inefficient - it can take many seconds to 
>> serialize small sets of data,
>> - on IE I can get slow script warnings
>> - I sometimes get stack over flows with deeply nested structures.
>>  
>> For example when I send over a tree of 10000 nodes (takes 20ms to 
>> create), it takes 5 seconds or more to deserialize. (I can give you a demo 
>> app that shows the problem)
>>  
>> I only get 2 seconds to impress my users, and I need to do quite a lot of 
>> operations besides sending the RPC.
>>  
>> I've heared the reactions multiple times: don't send soo much data over, 
>> but bytewise this is not soo much. It is highly compressible (just a few K 
>> in fact) data. We want to process complex data structures in the client, we 
>> don't want to create intermediate data structures to bypass the RPC 
>> inefficiencies.
>>  
>> There have been multiple attempts from google to write something better 
>> (DeRPC whichi is now deprecated, and RequestFactory which is very badly 
>> documented so I don't even know if I could reuse this one for generic RPC 
>> calls).
>>
>
> Indeed RequestFactory can be used for "generic RPC".
> Have a look at http://tbroyer.posterous.com/gwt-211-requestfactory and 
> http://tbroyer.posterous.com/gwt-211-requestfactory-part-ii
> It's rather old and might be inaccurate in a few places (hasn't been 
> updated for GWT 2.4's use of annotation-processing at compile-time, for 
> instance).
>  
>
>>  
>> Is it not time to start using json as the base format for GWT RPC ? I 
>> would even like to help out to get this working! It is really a pitty that 
>> somehow RPC is a selling point for GWT but in reality it often becomes the 
>> bottleneck of your application.
>>
>   
>> Can't we maybe put GWT RPC on the framework for request factory ?
>>  
>> One issue I also have with GWT RPC (but less pressing as the 
>> performanceissue) is the fact that it is not very friendly for mixing 
>> different client technologies. If it were a simple json REST payload 
>> (without obfuscation and lots of secret numbers) then we could easily reuse 
>> it everwhere, it would also make it soo much easier for loadtesting. Not a 
>> lot of tools support GWT RPC easily.
>>
>
> RequestFactory can easily be used in-process within tests, and ships with 
> a pure-Java client (usable on Android for instance). It comes with 2 
> "dialects" under the same API: its own RequestFactory protocol (JSON-based) 
> that deals with batching of method calls and sending only diffs for 
> entities, and JSON-RPC. The server-side component only supports the former 
> dialect though, the latter is only about using existing JSON-RPC services 
> (such as Google APIs) from a Java or GWT app.
>
> That said, I doubt RequestFactory would perform better for your 10000 
> nodes use-case (I think we can even say it will perform much worse than 
> RPC; this can probably be improved by doing more codegen at compile-time 
> and less reflection at runtime, but I'm not sure it'd even be better than 
> RPC; this is mostly about the server-side though, and possibly DevMode too; 
> it should be an all different story if you use the JSON-RPC dialect).
>
> An alternative to RPC and RF, using (a slightly modified) JSON-RPC 
> protocol with an RPC-like API is gwt-json-rpc, used by Gerrit: 
> https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gwtjsonrpc/ You'll find the JAR in a 
> Maven repo at https://gerrit-maven-repository.googlecode.com/svn/ (Gerrit 
> itself references https://gerrit-maven.commondatastorage.googleapis.comso I 
> think the googlecode repo is an old one; the 
> commondatastorage.googleapis one is not browsable though so it's hard to 
> tell which artifacts are in there). Look at the README file for details.
>
> Finally, it's a bit old (almost 4 years old) but it should still apply as 
> you're talking about IE: Flickr ditched JSON for a custom format for better 
> performances, maybe you could do something similar: 
> http://code.flickr.net/2009/03/18/building-fast-client-side-searches/
>

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