I've been working on a branch to eliminate the use of type names by GWT RPC. Type names over the wire are replaced with obfuscated identifiers and the client-side RPC code no longer relies on hard-coded type names. The RPC whitelist file is extended to include a map from type names to obfuscated identifiers.
You can either check out the branch or use the following merge command: svn merge -r4602:HEAD http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/changes/bobv/elide_rpc_type_names_r4602 This initial version makes the type removal opt-in because it's fundamentally incompatible with the LegacySerializationPolicy. To turn it on add the following to your module definition after you inherit User.gwt.xml: <inherits name="com.google.gwt.user.RemoteServiceObfuscateTypeNames" /> Additional savings can be had by hacking our Class.java's getName() method to return a constant value. With both of these optimizations, a modified Dynatable sample's size was reduced by 8% on average (91k -> 83k) by completely eliminating all class names from the compiled code. Payload size was reduced by 18% (1735b -> 1421b) due to the use of shorter identifiers. I couldn't measure a meaningful speed improvement, although I suspect that shorter names would result in faster hash lookups. Future changes: - A compiler flag or optional module to neuter Class.getName(). - The obfuscated string identifiers could be replaced by purely numeric values in the wire format. Supporting legacy RPC setups (IsSerializable and no RPC whitelist) requires String-based APIs, while a numeric system would require int-based APIs. I would suggest that we plan to drop support for legacy-style RPC (and force the use of the whitelist / meta-data file) in the next major release to further streamline the wire format and de-cruft the RPC code. -- Bob Vawter Google Web Toolkit Team --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
