In my setups I create maven profiles for building the portlet and developing in eclipse. By adding a webapp profile with sitemesh and setting up a basic sitemesh decorator for the portlet styling can be done without deploying to the container all the time.
Now, there are a few issues with the portlet plugin. One of them turned out to risk becoming a show-stopper for struts usage in my latest project. I've been spending some free time on digging into this and here's what I have come up with.
When form urls are rendered with the portlet plugin, the plugin adds a parameters containing the namespace and action (path) that should be executed when the form is submitted. This path is constructed from a number of parameters, the portlet namespace, current portlet mode namespace and the namespace declaration on the s:form tag. Normally, a simple test form would look like
<s:form>
<s:textfield name="value"/>
<s:submit method="submit" />
</s:form>
which is simple and clean and what I like about struts 2! Now let's say the action is executing in namespace /test/view as declared in the viewNamespace parameter from portlet.xml. Then the portlet url will become portlet namespace + mode namespace + tag namespace which results in "/test/view" + "" + "/test/view" since the third part is by default the namespace of the current action. Of course, this will not work.
Loosing some of the clean and simple and reusability the form can be fixed to work properly by manually setting the namespace to "nothing" and thus using only the mode namespace. This form can of course never be reused for other actions, but that might be a minor problem.
<s:form namespace="/">
<s:textfield name="value"/>
<s:submit method="submit" />
</s:form>
If you are also using a portlet namespace, then it probably gets worse and I won't even try to go there.
