[GROOVY-1070] Add antlib support to Groovy ant support

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.0-RC-1
• Component/s: Ant integration
• Environment: Ant version 1.6.4; Windows XP SP2; Groovy 1.0 JSR-3
• Flags: Patch
• Assignee: Ryan Harris
• Reporter: John Gibson
• Created: 21/Sep/05 15:46
• Updated: 05/Apr/15 14:25
• Resolved: 21/Sep/06 16:22

Description

Groovy does not appear to have support for running ant tasks that were loaded via antlib. I request that we add this support, because not having it hampers development of ant scripts.

Ant added the antlib feature in ant 1.6.0, here is a brief rundown of how antlib is used, and why groovy wasn't working for me:
When you use antlib tasks you first specify their namespace at the top of the buildfile like so:
<project name="foobar" ... xmlns:artifact="antlib:org.apache.maven.artifact.ant">

and then later on in the buildfile you can execute them like this

<artifact:dependencies pathId="foobar.classpath">
<dependency groupId="foo" artifactId="bar" version="1.1" />
...
</artifact:dependencies>

You can execute ant tasks from the AntBuilder by making groovy calls like this:
ant.<taskname>(attributes)

{ subelements }

For example:
ant.property(name:"myprop",value:"some value")

However this does not work for tasks loaded via antlib.
The calls fail in either the abbreviated or the complete form
ant.artifact:dependencies(...) {
...
}

ant.antlib:org.apache.maven.artifact:dependencies(...) {
...
}

I'm guessing that this doesn't work because the tasks' name contains periods and colons.

You can read more about antlib here http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTypes/antlib.html and here http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTypes/namespace.html