I posted about this: http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit/browse_thread/thread/483c57ad025f4a42/97a2e1e3a3b4dbbe?lnk=gst&q=notcourage#97a2e1e3a3b4dbbe but there wasn't much chatter. I was hoping a gwt team member would see the seriousness of this issue & add a guideline to the gwt docs.
On Dec 10, 2:06 pm, Ben Imp <benlee...@gmail.com> wrote: > Good day to everyone. I am the proud owner/developer/code money > responsible for a fairly new GWT application at my workplace. > Overall, the response to the application has been quite good and it > has been a pleasant change from the (now legacy) JSP development I > still have to do. Today, however, we have been getting some odd > errors, and although I believe I understand the issue, I was hoping to > strike up some discussion here, both to confirm my diagnosis and to > see if there are better ways of handling things in the GWT world. > > So, a bit of back story. I made an oops, and a bug escaped into > production during one of our scheduled releases, leaving the > eviscerated bodies of several QA people in its wake. Early the next > day, the flames of users began to roar in our inboxes as the symptoms > became apparent, and I quickly developed a fix. Because of the > severity of the issue, and fear of various forms of pox inflicted upon > us by the users, we deployed the fix in the middle of the day. For a > brief time, the flames went down, the users were placated with their > blankets, and all was well. > > Some time later, we were inundated with more flames, but of a > different kind. Many users began reporting strange errors when > attempting to navigate around the application. In particular, 404 > errors when downloading, or attempting to download anyway, code > fragments from the app server. The existence of the code fragments is > of no surprise, as some time ago we implemented code splitting as a > way to reduce the perceived slow startup time of the application. As > to why they began to fail to download, I had to ponder for a bit. > > I believe the answer to this is that our own haste has returned to > destroy us. Our mid-day deployment would seem to have unleashed upon > the world an app that isn't quite compatible with the clients that > some of our users had left open. The JS code fragments live in sub- > folders contained in the "deferredjs" directory of the deployment, and > it seems as though the sub-folders have names that may change. Based > on the random gibberish of the names, I would assume they are some > form of hashed value, although I haven't gone through the compiler > code to verify whether that is the case or not. But my theory is that > the old deployment, and the clients that were subsequently loaded from > that deployment, had different sub-directory names, and therefore when > the old clients attempted to load up new fragments, they 404'd out on > their attempts to fetch non-existent things. > > I'm hoping the general populace of this group could possibly help to > confirm this theory, if only to help retain what little of my sanity > remains, as there is not much else I can think of that would have > caused this. > > Now, assuming this to be true, we can simply be more careful with > future releases. It would be quite easy to send out e-mails in such > events, and tell the users to close their browsers and re-load the > application. For an organization of our size (<100 people), that is > an acceptable solution. However, I am wondering about solutions for > larger organizations, or perhaps even applications deployed to the > general web. The latter case would be particularly difficult due to > the high cost of gas and the inefficiency of driving around the world > and knocking on that many doors. > > I mulled over various possibilities in my head, such as having a > polling thread on the client that is checking for new versions, or > incorporating that check into the base message object that flies back > and forth. I suppose I could also look for the 404 errors in the > onFailure method of the RunAsyncCallback, but that seems hacky, and I > would have no guarantee that the evil clients would be closed before > they did unspeakable things to my precious data. > > Thoughts? Considerations? Ponies? > > -Ben -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to google-web-tool...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-web-toolkit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
