Question

I need a bit of clarity regarding whats possible with grails plugins before committing my self to a corner a month or two down the line,

We have two applications built in Grails what share the same model, however we are looking at creating a single application which will control the ACL and add the two Grails applications as plugins.

Now the two applications are very extensive and they have their own controllers, views and routing.

Is it still viable to integrate the two applications as grails plugins or is there another better way of doing it. In the past I have found that following a quick simple guide / tutorial on how to create a grails plugin for instance, might not really explain the other issues I might encounter as I take the two big applications which use plugins of their own and try to convert them to plugins…

Any heads up information would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Everyone’s needs are different. I’ll simply explain what we’ve done on a current project and then you can use that to help make your decision.

We have a “common” grails plugin. This plugin contains all of our domains, controllers, layouts, views, css, images, and js that are shared throughout our grails applications. The common plugin has the spring-security-core plugin installed since the security domains are, well, common to all the other applications. However, each application that uses are common plugin still specifies its own security. It uses the domains from common as well as the spring-security-core plugin installed in common, but each application can control its own access points and lock down the URLs that need locked down.

We have an admin application
We have a customer facing application which has both secured and un-secure content.
And we have a couple other internal only applications that use our common plugin.

We’ve been at this for 6 months and haven’t noticed any drawbacks to this approach.