I've finally done XFire plugin for Grails

Last post, I mentioned about Grails plugin architecture in 0.4. This great feature allows us to develop our own plugins. I firstly thought that it might be difficult to develop my own one. But after having a look into some plugin codes in Grails itself, and another one - OpenLaszlo plugin. I finally got some ideas about how the plugin works, and what to do.

However, I was suffered a bit by bugs from Spring Bean Builder because it doesn't provide complete APIs to cover methods I need, such as "bean.initMethod". Anyway, it's not too hard to figure it out, and I have some workaround to avoid these bugs. I'm planning to fix them soon after my XFire plugin is stable for Grails 0.4.

So, what's about the XFire plugin for Grails ?
It's a plugin to expose a Grils service as a Web service. Only requirement is that the service must have "XFireService" suffix. The plugin scans pulbic methods of the service, and generates complex type definition for parameter and return types using a modified XFire's Aegis engine.
For a Grails domain class, this plugin will generate type information for every properties, including "id", but it will ignore "version" and other Groovy specific properties.
If you want to exclude some methods, you can define "static excludes = []" in the service.

Here's some example:

class MyXFireService {

def static excludes = ["notMe"]

def String myMethod(MyDomain d) {
d.save()
return "test"
}

def String notMe() {
return "nothing"
}
}

I've added a page for this plugin at Grails space here:
http://grails.org/XFire+plugin