Which is the best way to include Grails into Liferay? - grails

I'm trying to include Grails applications into a Liferay portlet. I tried the Grails Liferay Portlets Plugin but it did not work for me at all.
Does anybody know any other possibilities? Which do you think is the best and why?

We had our Grails project integrated with Liferay at one point but it was a mess. Inevitably we pulled it out of Liferay and we were able to use Grails properly again. In our instance the question became, why are we using Liferay and do we really need it?
Now if you have a requirement for Liferay you might try simply using Spring Portlet support and use parts of Grails you like but not fully integration. Spring Portlets with Groovy were much easier and cleaner to do. If you simply want Grails goodies for services etc. you can try deploying a Grails WAR on the same tomcat and expose services to your portlets through REST, Hessian, Burlap or some other easy service serialization mechanism in Spring/Grails. In this case you have a Liferay UI app that calls your Grails services.
Once again, try some options, then decide if you truly need (or have) to use Liferay. With advances in Javascript UI packages, I'm not sure 'portlet' spec apps are as appealing as they once were and the word 'portal' is something that sounds good to management but inevitably means little to what needs to be implemented.

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Configure an Activiti BPM?

I want to know that how to configure/run Activiti BPM in Grails?? I'm using fedora as my OS, Grails 2.1 . If their is any tutorial websites are is plz mention it also..
There is a plugin for Grails applications that provides much of Activiti within a Grails app. http://grails.org/plugin/activiti However, development has sadly stopped on it by the main developer. The last update was for Activiti 5.9 and Grails 2.1, though much of the plugin content seems to be built for older versions of Grails; for example, actions in the plugin's TaskController are all closures, not methods. Also, someone did issue a pull request to update it to 5.10.
I've been trying to puzzle through the source for that plugin myself. I keep vacillating between simply setting up a standalone Activiti server and utilizing the RESTful API from within a Grails Service class, importing a few of the Activiti classes into my Grails app, or trying to re-engineer the plugin to suit my needs (my site is stuck on Grails 2.0.1 for the time being).

Document Storage That Works Well with Grails

We need to manage various documents and files in our Grails application. Is there anything out there that integrates well with Grails that is specifically document management and not a full CMS?
Have you looked at JCR (Java Content Repository) implementations? On a past Java (not grails/groovy) project, I had a lot of success with Apache Jackrabbit.
However, it surprises me that the grails plugin support for JCR and/or Jackrabbit seems somewhat immature and uncompleted at this time. If you're interested, perhaps we could partner and write something together for this.

Does Grails have any plugins similar to the django-debug-toolbar (djdt)?

Does Grails have any plugins with functionality similar to the django-debug-toolbar (djdt)?
See this screencast for an introduction to djdt.
Why yes it does grails debug-toolbar:
Grails Debug Toolbar is a plugin
inspired from Django Debug Toolbar
While it doesn't have all the features of djdt it is planned to expand the feature set in the future, here is relevant section from their webpage:
Future work
Currently the views of debugtoolbar
need to go in the grails-app/views of
the application. When you install the
plugin they are automatically copied
to your application grails-app/views.
Need to avoid this.
JavaScript and
static resources for the toolbar
reside in web-app/debugtoolbar. It is
also copied to your application
web-app/debugtoolbar. Need to avoid
this.
A way of ordering the panels in
the toolbar. Currently it is random
depending on how beans are found
during execution of tag.
More useful panels such as Timing the requests, SQL queries, logging etc
It not quite a toolbar (and not a plugin) but Spring Insight gives you detailled request timing right down to the JDBC level. It integrates pretty nicely with Spring Tool Suite from what I've seen.
Check out Peter's screencast: http://www.grails.org/blog/view/pledbrook/New+screencast%3A+Profiling+with+STS+%26+Spring+Insight
You need to deploy your app to Spring's tcServer rather than a plain tomcat which might be fine for development tuning.
cheers
Lee

Is it possible to add Grails MVC classes at deployment time?

I'm writing a Grails app which I'd like 3rd parties to augment at runtime. Ideally they would be able to add a JAR/WAR to the webapp directory which contains new domain, controller and service classes, new views, and other content.
Is there a simple way to do this within grails? Would it be simplest to create a startup script which copies the new classes etc. into the relevant directories and then updates grails.xml and web.xml?
You will be able to do this in version 2 of grails in which plugins will be also OSGI plugins http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILS/fixforversion/15421
It seems that the Grails plugins will actually fit quite well for this: http://www.grails.org/Understanding+Plugins
A plugin can do just about anything... One thing a plugin cannot do though is modify the web-app/WEB-INF/web.xml or web-app/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml files. A plugin can participate in web.xml generation, but not modify the file or provide a replacement. A plugin can NEVER change the applicationContext.xml file, but can provide runtime bean definitions

Suggested Grails plugins to make Grails a good CMS option

We are trying to look for plugins for Grails to make a CMS site. Any suggestions?
Check out Weceem at
http://www.weceem.org/weceem/
I've never used it but apparently it can be used as a stand-alone site or integrated into an existing grails app as a plugin.
There is also Alfresco plugin, though it's likely more focused on the document management side of Alfresco (it allows both Document Management and Web Content Management).

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