If the gwt project in Eclipse uses Eclipse to compile the java code using the automatic build feature then the gwtc compile using ant does not show any problems. If however, I clean all the existing .class files and then execute an ant build which runs javac and then gwtc, I get problems with my JPA entities such as:
[ERROR] Line 12: No source code is available for type javax.persistence.metamodel.SingularAttribute; did you forget to inherit a required module?
I should note that I am making sure that the classpath for the ant build is using the same exact set of libraries that is present in the Eclipse "Java Build Path". Since Eclipse does not apparently provide a log of the build process I cannot determine if there is some divergence. Since the projects have to build on Hudson on the build server (which has the problem I outlined) I cannot rely on a dev machine doing the .class generation and then gwtc doing the gwt compilations.