gwt dev模式运行时的服务器端测试用例

Question

So I have this (a bit) weird idea - there is The System being developed which is communicating with outside world through various services, but it's entirely server-side and is deployed as a single war. I'd like to write a basic UI (dev/debug-grade, not intended for production) for it. The main goals:

• Avoid calling The System services, instead call methods directly on the java objects
• Use GWT
• Must work both from test-cases (testng) and as a deployed war on tomcat (preferably both in development and production gwt modes)
• keep it seperate, limit changes to The System

So... How to do this with gwt? When deploying to tomcat, I'd put both into the same war. (because different wars have different classloaders). When running testcases (integration, they use db and everything) I'd start embedded jetty during initialization and register new gwt servlet.

Ok, this sounds doable. But what about dev mode? I'd like to be able to start regular dev mode which would allow to

• modify UI code (it would obviously do), and
• modify serverside code (which I would normally achieve with jrebel) - but how to run testcases in this case? I will not rewrite them for sure.

Dropping the idea to run UI and The System in the same jvm would help and would allow nice separation, but would also force me to write some pointless RPC/RMI/something stuff.

Any insights on how to approach this?

Btw - this is just an after-hours project, so crazy-I-would-never-do-that-in-a-real-system ideas are welcome.

Answer 1

Running the backend (Tomcat,Jetty, etc) and the frontend (GWT dev mode) in separate JVM works just fine. That's actually now more or less the recommended approach (especially if you want to use SuperDevMode at some point).

Here is my development strategy using eclipse:

1. Start the backend server using WTP and Jetty in debug mode (JRebel for hot swapping classes when I change something on the backend).
2. Start GWT dev mode
3. Open GWT app in browser

This way when I change something in the GWT part I just have to refresh the browser and I see the changes in the UI.
JRebel takes care of all changes in the backend part.

Communication between frontend and backend is done the same way as it would have been done in production mode ( RequestFactory , RPC or RequestBuilder ).