What is asset-pipeline plugin and resources plugin?
What are the differences between them?
What are the advantages and disadvantages?
Are this mandatory to work with different js and css framework?
What is asset-pipeline plug-in and resources plug-in?
Both of this are grails plug-in which enables programmer to use web related resources or assets such as style sheets, js etc in an easy and efficient way .
This plug-in reduces developers overhead in dealing with dependency, order of loading and many other issues and also make efficient use of resources or assets by compressing or removing duplicates and decreasing the loading time
What are the differences between them?
There are many difference between them like how they load resources, how they keep resources, how they find duplicates, file system organization etc.
What are the advantages and disadvantages?
Advantages of asset-pipeline over standard grails resources plug-in:
File dependencies are in the top of your assets. (No Resources.groovy) Assets in plugins become level with your app. On the fly processing in Development mode (No more waiting for reloads) Coffeescript, LESS, and others become first class citizens ( debuggable ) Require entire folder trees with one line Better minification (UglifyJs) , and compiling before the WAR is built Faster application startup time Easy extensibility
Are this mandatory to work with different js and css framework?
No, you can directly use resources or assets, but it would be messy and inefficient.
Ref:
http://grails-plugins.github.io/grails-resources/guide/