GWT+hibernate for highly interactive web application?

Question

As a Java developer new to the web development environment, I was quite excited to find Grail which provides a great framework especially the convenience of abstracting DB operations with ORM. I later learned that it is actually the function of hibernate. At the same time I am delighted to learn about GWT. It is a god send for the project. I can continue building applications with event driven widgets using Java. Yeah!!

The answer seems clear: GWT + Hibernate. Will it work? What do I miss? Why there is much talk about this set up? What is the concern or area of risk? Have anyone tried this before?

Or, how do GWT developers handle the challenge of data persistence? What are the options?

Also I can't seem to find a good tutorial about setting up Hibernate with Eclipse -- the IDE I am familiar with. What are the tools or plug-ins needed?

Answer 1

If you want to go the hibernate way, you should have a look at Gilead or its predecessor hibernate4gwt. It works pretty well, but documentation is a bit sparse.

Answer 2

Hibernate works fine with GWT as long as you keep in mind that the GWT code is actually running on the browser so you can't manipulate Hibernate objects in your client code. The downside to that is you're probably going to have duplicate objects on the client and server side, but you can use course-grained DTOs via the GWT remote procedure calls. On the server side, just create a ServletListener to initialize your Hibernate project and then use normal Hiberate methods to store and retrieve objects.

As far as Hibernate and Eclipse, Hibernate has an Eclipse plugin, but it's not really necessary to develop in Eclipse. It gives you the ability to run HQL and to reverse engineer Java objects from the database or vice versa, which can be useful, but it's not required.