Google App Engine and Objectify-gwt

Question

I am trying to put together my first Google App Engine applicaton and having ploughed through the docs and some examples I decided that I quite like the Objectify approach. However, I also like GWT but passing an Objectify object to a GWT class causes issues.

So I tried Objectify-gwt but there just seems to be tumbleweed blowing thorugh that project. Any examples seem to date from 2010/2011 but the project seems to have been forked off the main Objectify branch recently (April 2014) so I was just wondering if it has a future.

If not, what is a good pattern for passing data between an Objectify back end and a GWT front-end? Do I really have to have two sets of objects, one in the persistence layer and one in the UI?

Answer 1

objectify-gwt is a very small bit of code which doesn't require much in the way of updates. That said, someone just submitted a pull request that fixes a problem with Gradle builds. It's overdue for a new release. But unless GAE adds some new data types, objectify-gwt is pretty much done. I wouldn't worry about the future of objectify-gwt any more than I would worry about the future of GWT in general.

That said, I think the value of passing raw entity types back and forth across the GWT-RPC boundry is overrated. It tends to produce an Anemic Domain Model. When I was actively using GWT, I tended to do this with simple embedded components and not with whole entities. But every project is different; maybe it is a good approach for you.