Alternatives to SoapUI

I've found that although SoapUI is very useful, it can be extremely clunky. It takes up a dramatic amount of resources on either my Ubuntu or Windows boxes.  So, I found some great browser plugins that can do the exact same thing. I've fallen in love with Postman Rest Client. I mean who couldn't love a plugin named after an awful Kevin Costner film?!?!  Anyways, you can find many other plugins for both Firefox and Chrome.  Just Google chrome rest client OR firefox rest client do look at the many options available to you.  You're bound to find one that you like.  Cheers!

GWT 'the response could not be deserialized' in Dev Mode

My current job has me doing GWT for the front-end technologies and I ran across this error the other day and couldn't figure it out:

com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.IncompatibleRemoteServiceException: The response could not be deserialized
I Googled it and found that the main solution was that this was a common problem and almost always happened because some of the classes in the shared package that you were sending to the client hadn't implemented IsSerializable or Serializable.

I was perplexed by this because I had made no code changes to these objects since the last time I ran it. I double checked that they did indeed implement one of the right interfaces, and they did.

Also, it was working fine when it wasn't in Dev Mode (i.e. adding the 'gwt.codesvr=127.0.0.1:9997' to the end of it and letting the GWT Plugin compile the front end stuff on the fly).  The only thing I'd changed is that I had an updated copy of our QA database.

So, I decided to do a 'printStackTrace' on the Throwable object it was returning, to get to the heart of the matter. At the bottom of the stack trace, I found this:

Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: FAILED ASSERTION
at com.google.gwt.dev.js.rhino.Context.codeBug(Context.java:769)
at com.google.gwt.dev.js.rhino.Parser.sourceAddString(Parser.java:1424)
at com.google.gwt.dev.js.rhino.Parser.primaryExpr(Parser.java:1342)
at com.google.gwt.dev.js.rhino.Parser.memberExpr(Parser.java:1163)
at com.google.gwt.dev.js.rhino.Parser.unaryExpr(Parser.java:1079)

I put a break point in there and found that one of the Strings that was being passed from the server to the client was too big!  I shorted the String (it was a field in the database) and it worked!

It's strange that this only happens in Dev-Mode.  I think that GWT uses different libraries to compile on-the-fly than it does to actually compile for the end product.