Telling GWT To Ignore Certain Classes

We recently hit a problem in RHQ that required us to learn about a feature in GWT (specifically the GWT compiler) that was very useful and I thought I would blog about it.

First, some background. In RHQ, we have split up the source code into several "modules". Each module is built by Maven and artifacts are produced (for example, some modules will output a jar file after the build completes). Dependent artifacts are built first, then modules that depend on other modules' artifacts are built afterwards - Maven knows how to maintain the proper dependent hierarchy so it can build modules in the proper order. After our entire suite of modules are built, the build system assembles all the module artifacts into the RHQ distribution. As you can see, there is nothing special here, any complex application needs a build system that does the same thing.

One of RHQ's modules is what we call the "domain" module. This is simply the module that contains the source code for all of our domain objects that map to our data model (in other words, the domain objects simply represent the set of all of our database entities, such as Users, or Roles, or Resources, or Alerts, etc.)

These domain objects are essentially the basic building blocks on which all of RHQ is built. These domain objects are used all throughout the RHQ codebase - in the agent, in the server, in the remote CLI and in the GWT client. All of their modules depend on the domain module - the domain module is one of the first ones built.

Since our GWT client needs these domain objects, the domain module needs to not only be passed through the Java compiler, it needs a second pass through the GWT compiler.

Here is where the problem comes in. Some of our domain objects require that they import certain Java classes that GWT doesn't support. Because the domain objects are used everywhere, they end up needing to provide functionality that is required by the server and agent, not just the GWT client. But this functionality sometimes requires the use of certain JRE features that are not emulated, and thus not available, in the GWT runtime (things such as java.io or java.sql classes).

But how can we do this? If we import these GWT-unsupported JRE classes into some the domain classes, the GWT client cannot load the domain jar and the GWT client becomes dead. But without those JRE classes, the functionality that the domain module needs to provide to the other modules (like the server or agent) becomes broken. It is a catch-22. So, the question becomes, how can we provide all of the domain module functionality to all dependent modules, but remove only portions of it that are not GWT compatible from the GWT client module?

One idea was to create another module - a second domain module - that was compatible with the GWT client (essentially it would be the original domain module, minus the GWT-incompatible code). We could possibly do this by refactoring the original domain objects and creatively using inheritance. But it would give us two domain jars. Adding yet another module to the build isn't something we wanted to do.

As it turns out, after being perplexed at how best to design around this problem, we found out that GWT provides a very, very easy solution to this. You can tell the GWT compiler to filter out and exclude certain classes when it compiles the Java source into GWT Javascript. Since those classes don't get compiled into GWT Javascript, the GWT client never sees them or tries to load them. Without having to split our domain module into two separate modules, we get the effect of having two different domain libraries - one for the GWT client and one for the rest of the RHQ system.

Now we can use normal Java inheritance to share common code while at the same time we ensure that only certain subclasses will use the non-GWT-supported features of the JRE. We can then exclude those subclasses from the GWT compilation thus allowing the GWT client to load the domain module, minus those classes it couldn't use anyway.

To use this feature, we had to add the <exclude> XML element to our GWT module's XML file in order to tell the GWT compiler which Java classes to ignore:

<entry-point class="org.rhq.core.client.RHQDomain" />
<source path="domain">
   <exclude name="**/DriftFileBits.*" />
</source>

This essentially tells the GWT compiler to compile all of our domain module's classes except for the DriftFileBits class. If, in the future, we have to introduce other classes that are not supported by GWT, we can add more <exclude> elements to filter out those additional Java packages or individual classes.

One negative aspect of this is that we have to be careful to not "leak" references to those excluded classes into our GWT API or GWT implementation classes. But even if we do, it is caught rather quickly when the GWT client attempts to load the application.