Hidden gem: grails.war.resources

In the process of packaging up the Grails application as a WAR in preparation for deployment to Tomcat, I needed to figure out a way to exclude the Oracle JDBC drver from WEB-INF/lib (we use 'shared' Oracle driver for our web apps which gets loaded by the Catalina's common ClassLoader). So I was thinking of a way to provide an "event hook" script, and while reading Grails' War.groovy I found a "hidden gem". That is a closure which is defined in the application's Config.groovy. So when this closure is defined, the War.groovy calls it with "staging directory" as a parameter and sets Ant as its 'delegate' right before zipping it up as a war.

So I was able to do the following (... from Config.groovy):

//Closure to customize the packaging of a war. In particular it excludes the Oracle JDBC driver
//from the war as it is loaded by the Catalina common ClassLoader when deployed to Tomcat
grails.war.resources = {stagingDir ->
 delete(file: "$stagingDir/WEB-INF/lib/ojdbc14-10.2.jar")
}

This is real nice, but I don't think this feature is documented anywhere.

Later...

Grails 1.0 is golden!

Yes, after more than 2 years in the making, with the development team hard at work, the Grails 1.0 final has been officially released. IMO, this event is historical and a great milestone for "lightweight" web development on the JVM platform.

Happy Grails hacking!

Later...