Major GWT Pain: Translating and reusing Objects for over the wire transport.

I had my brush with first major pain using GWT today - translating and transporting Objects over the wire.

After reading numerous posts on the gwt groups, I decided to try to reuse and transport the model entities over wire using a GWT 1.5 build. I ran into my first pain point - need to have model entity sources on the classpath, and have a GWT module specified for them. Since my project is broken up into separate modules (and Eclipse projects) this was not as straight forward. I finally ended up adding 'Model.gwt.xml' to my web-module itself and 'installing' (Maven speak!) sources for model classes to the local repository.

Tried running the GWT compiler again, and it complains about javax.persistence.* imports. Fixed that by including Geronimo sources JAR; tried again, and now its a bunch of Guice and Commons Loggin imports :-(

Eclipse - why.... oh why no UML modeling?

Eclipse has been my chosen IDE for 4+ years now, but lately, devoting more time on open source projects I find lack of a good non-commercial UML modeling tool very frustrating :(

So, I finally downloaded Netbeans last evening and to my surprise there is a UML modeling plugin available in Netbeans' plugin repository.

I am contemplating a switch of IDE unless Eclipse can convince me to stick with it.

Hopefully some Eclipse enthusiast is tuned in on this frequency and listening to my UML rants and point me to a UML modeling tool!

oh, how I miss Rational Rose...