Problem with Grails on Glassfish v3?

I almost gave up trying to run grails applications on Glassfish v3. Today I stumbled on a solution that was so easy that I should be ashamed I did not investigate a bit further. The problem is with some OSGi headers and is documented here.

Others have had the problem and the solution I found on nabble was pretty simple:
Add the following line in BuildConfig.groovy in your project that should run on a Glassfish v3.

grails.project.war.osgi.headers=false

This helps with the problem not being able to deploy a grails app on Glassfish v3 when you experience the following hints in the log on GF:

SEVERE: Module type not recognized
SEVERE: There is no installed container capable of handling this application com.sun.enterprise.deploy.shared.FileArchive@68237947

Struts2 on Glassfish v3

OMG. It was not that trivial to get it going, at least not using Netbeans.

First trying to use maven since I need to have some EJBs, but I gave up after not being able to get the archetype for Struts2 do any project for me, first complaining about no commons-collections-3.2.1, downloading it and got a little bit longer, but then could not find anything for struts2.1.6.

So I went on creating a Struts2 project and got it to work by pointing out the jar files needed in Netbeans JavaEE webproject for Glassfish, YES there is a lot of jarfiles depending on each other since I also want to use TILES. Anyway, when I wanted the use the EJBs I had to create a EAR-project to hold everything together, what happens then?

Struts2 stops working, complaining of a lot of classes not loaded or cannot find. I spent almost all the afternoon before finally finding the problem.

Netbeans ant-script wants to copy every f...ing jar file that is not a TLD to the lib of the EAR, NOT into the Web applications WEB-INF/lib, which then makes sence for the errors in the log: when loading from that EAR/lib folder, it can not find struts-core classes since that jar file is in the Web-app because it includes TLDs,

So finally solved, hack the build-impl.xml and copy ALL jar files to the web-app so it works.Why Netbeans do this way I do not know, maybe someone can inform me?

Netbeans tutorial "Generating a JavaServer Faces 2.0 CRUD Application from a Database"

I went through this tutorial today. Nice example, but there was something I did not like. As a geek I sit on a sunday and try out a tutorial on my home computer. Lazy as I am I do not want to start my MySql instance, since adding more running components tend to slow down my almost four year old Toshiba laptop.

Since I was going to run Glassfish v3 anyway I was thinking a better idea is to have the database in the form of JavaDB, so I tweaked the script to fit into Derby instead, not much tweaking to do actually and doing it made me happy to not be forced to start MySql (My mysql is by the way a bit old and installed the same time as I installed InstantRails long time ago, and probably needs to be updated). The insert script in the tutorial work more or less as it is in JavaDB just remove the 3 SET-clauses in the top and the COMMIT in the end and it should work.

The script can be found at my google-site http://sites.google.com/site/ironicprogrammer/home/jsf-2-0-tutorial-db-script