This issue came up as I was dealing with the Spring Portlet ResourceRequest change(before I found the problem/solution).  Still not getting the portlet to render views via ResourceRequests properly, I decided to test with Spring 3.2.x to see if the problem would follow.  I was also curious to see what changes would be made on the portlet side of things, any added improvements or shortcuts?  Based on the 3.2.x changelog, not much was changed regarding portlet support(ctrl+f “portlet”).  But its never that simple, right?

Enter SPR-8684.  This change actually makes things easy for most Spring webapps; automatically prepending the contextPath and servletPath in the Spring form tag is an easy shortcut.  But for portlets, this renders the form tag essentially useless.  Portlets don’t want their forms to be prepended with their own contextPath, they should resolve to the portal’s contextPath.  The good news is that my request for a fix was accepted almost instantly, SPR-10382.  So I’ll just have to wait to use Spring 3.2.3.

I know many of my most recent posts have been about problems using Spring, but I don’t want to sound like a complainer.  Without Spring I would be without a brilliant framework to code portlets with, and its a pretty niche area to be honest.  I love Spring because they are constantly moving forward by adding new ideas and technologies into their product.  Also, the community support is pretty fantastic!