CODEWITHSUNDEEP
antgroovy
UnPlan2ned
UnPlan2ned

Reputation: 183

Groovy scripts in Ant: Use script task or groovy task?

If you want to run a Groovy script in Ant, you can either use the script task like this: ..

<script language="groovy">
//foo
</script>

..or the groovy task like that:

<groovy>
//foo
</groovy>

Both ways require the Groovy libraries to be downloaded. I found a promising looking Ant config that does this automatically in this answer: Execute my groovy script with ant or maven

Now for my question:

Which of the two Ant tasks is meant to be used for running Groovy scripts? script or groovy?

Also, what is the purpose of the "additional" groovy task, if there's a script task included in Ant that supports groovy?

Also I'd like to quote from a blog post I found here: http://jbetancourt.blogspot.co.at/2012/03/run-groovy-from-ants-script-task.html

Of course, why would you use the 'script' task when the 'groovy' task is available? You wouldn't.

Does anyone agree with the author of this post? If so - could you explain the idea behind it?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 9230

Answers (1)

Rebse
Rebse

Reputation: 10377

+1 for Josef's statement about the groovy task (btw. his blogs http://josefbetancourt.wordpress.com/ and http://octodecillion.com/ are worth reading)
Using groovy a lot for several purposes, in ant i exclusively use the groovy task because of his slick syntax providing simple access to ant api, consider this example :

<project>
  <taskdef name="groovy" classname="org.codehaus.groovy.ant.Groovy"/>

  <property name="foo" value="bar"/>

  <script language="groovy">
   project.setProperty 'foo', 'baz'
   echo = project.createTask 'echo'
   echo.setMessage 'Howdie :-)'
   echo.execute()
  </script>

  <echo>1. $${foo} => ${foo}</echo>

  <groovy>
    properties.'foo' = 'baaz'
    ant.echo 'Howdie :-)'
  </groovy>

  <echo>2. $${foo} => ${foo}</echo>

</project>

Which do you prefer ? OK, normally instead of echo. ... you would use print or println,
it's just for demonstrating the access to ant api.

Upvotes: 6

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