Geronimo and Grails

I am writing an article for IBM developerWorks on using Grails and Geronimo together. However, I am unable to deploy a Grails WAR to Geronimo.

I first tried it with Geronimo 2.1.1 with Jetty. The error I got was a NoClassDefFound for org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItemFactory. This class is the Geronimo repository, and is also included with the Grails war. It's the same version for both.

Next I tried it with Geronimo 2.1.1 with Tomcat. This time I got a dom4j InvalidXPathException.

Next I tried the Little G distribution. It worked perfectly. I had also tried standalone Tomcat with success as well, so I guess this should not have been too surprising.

Obviously I have to point a finger at Grails or Geronimo, and since it works fine on Tomcat or Little G, I am pointing the finger at Geronimo. The Geronimo/Jetty error sure smelled like a class loader problem, but I have no clue on the Geronimo/Tomcat. Note, in all cases I included a Geronimo deployment plan inside the WAR (/WEB-INF/geronimo-web.xml)

Any ideas/advice is greatly appreciated.