Chapter 3. Communicating with the Server
This chapter covers
- Making RPCs with GWT
- Using Tomcat Lite for development
- Using an external development server
In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.
Jon Postel
In the last chapter, we examined the MVC architectural pattern on the client and created a simple client-side GWT application. Naturally, the next thing we need to do is learn how to communicate with server resources.
GWT provides a simple and asynchronous RPC and object-serialization mechanism that allows the client and server to talk. This RPC mechanism is the canonical means of enabling client-server communications within GWT, but it’s not the only way. We’ll stay focused on standard GWT RPC in this chapter, and we’ll cover the other means in chapter 5, once we have a bit more background.