Grails: Difference in behavior between run-war and run-app - facebook

Question

I am using the FB cookie and trying to decode it into json, the code looks similar to this
def value = cookie.value
String[] tokens = value.split('\\.')
String decodeToken = new String(Base64.decodeBase64(tokens[1].getBytes()),
'UTF-8')
def jsonValue = JSON.parse(decodeToken)
Where the cookie is the one that facebook creates when using the login plugin.
Now, when I run this using run-app, there are no issues. However, when running it using run-war, an exception is thrown when the JSON parser tries to create the JSON object from the String.
Caused by: org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.json.JSONException: Expected a ',' or '}' at character 304 of {"algorithm":"HMAC-SHA256","code":"AQCvjV......."user_id":...50089"\00\00
Debugging it further, it seems the String that gets created from the decode call, is fine when run in the context of run-app. But when run-war is done, the last character of the String is not a '}' but some garbled character - and this is the one that causes the parser to throw an exception.
What could be a cause of this? What would be a good point to start debugging this further?
I have even tried to invoke getBytes() by using a specific encoding - but to no avail.

Answer 1

run-app runs a grails applications and allows the reloading from resources
run-war generates a war file and runs the war file, so no reloading of resources.
you could manually do grails war and then run it on a local instance of tomcat.