Grails and Primefaces

I spent the first day of the new year learning about Grails Plugins and how to integrate JSF2, Webflow and Primefaces together in a grails application.  My goal was to create a plugin that I could use to add what I think would be a great set of features for UI development altogether into a Grails app.  No luck so far but I did learn some things.

First, Spring's bigotry against JSF shines thru with Grails.  Aside from ICEFaces donating a plugin to try and get you to use IceFaces in Grails, there is not much information about JSF integration out there.

Second, WebFlow seems to be a second class citizen in Grails these days too.  It used to be a default plugin, now they say you just add it yourself, and the source code says it's on github, but there's no evidence of it there as near as I can tell.

Those two issues put a halt on my progress but there are a few things I learned that may be of interest to you.  First, plugins write to the web.xml via the XXXGrailsPlugin.groovy.  For example,
def doWithWebDescriptor = { webXml ->
def contextParam = webXml."context-param"

contextParam[contextParam.size()-1]+{
'context-param' {
'param-name'('javax.faces.DEFAULT_SUFFIX')
'param-value'('.xhtml')
}
}

can be used to add the JSF default suffix context parm.  There are similar methods for writing filters, servlets, listeners etc.  Check out XMLSlurper (http://groovy.codehaus.org/api/groovy/util/XmlSlurper.html).

The svn repository of existing plugins is at https://svn.codehaus.org/grails-plugins and is a good resource to see how others have gone about things.

The spirng examples svn now includes a Primefaces/WebFlow example project (https://src.springframework.org/svn/spring-samples/webflow-primefaces-showcase).  It's a good starting point, particularly for non-Grails.

This new year I hope to increase my internal fortitude and take a run at JSF/Grails/Primefaces plugin again!