[errai-dev] Errai vs. RequestFactory - where to go?

Hi, I have been working on a CRUD-enabling plugin for Forge some time ago and have been immersed in a real world project using it's outcome for some time (Jonathan Fuerth has been discussing it already). While trying to find a useful abstraction for the persistence bridging code I totally overlooked GWT RequestFactory, which seems to provide an interesting framework for CRUD applications. IMHO the most important points: - an EntityProxy interface and along with it an EntityProxyId - client side RequestContext for instantiation and lookup - an extensible server side instantiation and lookup framework - a transportable/queuable abstraction for entity changes These are IMHO indispensable to bridge to ORM because GWT imposes too many restrictions on the classes/code it can handle. I have had an intensive look at the code to find a reason for Errai _not_ to support this part of GWT, and I think that Errai is nearly there. - Interfaces: ObjectBuilder and ClassBuilderTest show, that an implementation of new <Interface>() {} is prepared already to great extent - server side lookup: would be implementable as kind of server side "second pass" DefinitionsFactory.loadCustomMappings - I did it by hooking statically into custom MappingDefinitions It is yet unclear for me how a client side RequestContext could look like, if it should work transparent and annotation driven. Ditto for EntityChange events. I read in a blog comment by Mike Brock, that you do not plan to support RequestFactory. Can you please provide some insight why you do not want to go that route and what kind of alternative you are working on? Best regards, Thomas