using the new UI Binder technology with GWT2.0 to create the UI in XML rather than Java classes.

The first cut at the icechat gwt client was done using a mocked out backend (while the target technologies were being sorted out). The original plan was to use CDI for the service layer however this will not work in Jetty (which is used by GWT's developement mode.) This raises a question: should the demo be able to run in dev mode out of the box. I would think the answer to this is yes! That being the case - I will use the abstract controller logic beans and not use any middleware technology. Simply placing the beans in Servlet context to make them singleton should be sufficient.

I thought of another idea that I will attempt to implement in the GWT chat demo:

register one push group and callback for the draft text of a particular chat room and then modify the RPC to return a ChatRoomDraft transfer object which indicates the message and own sent it. I am not sure why I did not think about this earlier (but maybe other users of the API will think as I did originally). There would be a slight increase in the size of the transfer objects but I think it would be negligible. I will implement and describe if it is an improvement.