it has become painfully apparent that GWT and Hibernate don’t play well together. Hibernate mapped POJO’s are instrumented and will not compile/serialize to JavaScript. The only solution I have found is to create “mirror classes”, one for Hibernate, identical for GWT, and use this code http://gwt-spring-hibernate-reference.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/GWT_Spring_Hibernate_Sample/server_src/org/gwtspringhibernate/reference/rlogman/server/GeneralHelper.java
to, via reflection, copy all properties. It takes care of one problem intrinsic to Hibernate, mapped Date columns aren’t really java.util.Date, but java.sql.Date, which also wont serialize. It does not handle collections, or things much needed like BigDecimal.
A bit of tooling would really help here. Generate the mirror POJO’s, instead of reflection, generate Helpers to copy the properties, fix the Date types, provide options on copy of embedded collections, generate RemoteService stubs, add GWT Capabilities to a project, etc…
I don’t need a visual designer, just some things to take out the repetitive grunt work.