How To Create Maven Dependencies using DSL in Groovy

2015-09-04 305 words 2 minutes

Contents

This post shows how to create Maven’s dependency elements (used in pom.xml file) programmatically, using DSL (Domain-Specific Language).

You may find it useful, when you need to convert e.g. an old Java project (with dozens of required dependency jar files in one folder) into Maven project, i.e. create a new pom.xml file with all necessary dependency elements.

Of cause, it exists a lot of different ways how to do it, but I solved this task using dynamic nature of Groovy and its metaprogramming capabilities, which makes it attractive for building DSLs.

The basic idea of a domain specific language (DSL) is a computer language that’s targeted to a particular kind of problem,… M. Fowler

If you are not familiar either with DSL (Domain-Specific Language) or its support in Groovy, learn from the following links:

Here is a core of our DSL implementation:

def xml = new MyDependencyBuilder(out:System.out)
 
//print dependency - using DSL
xml.dependency {
    groupId "org.springframework"
    artifactId "spring-core"
    version "4.2.1.RELEASE"
}

The core class consist of one variable to output a result (def out) and a methodMissing implementation. Customizing the behavior of methodMissing (and propertyMissing in addition) is the heart of Groovy runtime metaprogramming, so we can create methods on the fly.

Every time you call any missing method, the runtime of Groovy routes the call to our methodMissing, just before throwing a MissingMethodException exception.

In a case of Closure params (line 5), we need to delegate all its calls back, to our methodMissing method using a change in Closure’s delegate property.

Here is an example of usage of this class:

def xml = new MyDependencyBuilder(out:System.out)
 
//print dependency - using DSL
xml.dependency {
    groupId "org.springframework"
    artifactId "spring-core"
    version "4.2.1.RELEASE"
}

All of the above should print something like this (without whitespaces):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
    <version>4.2.1.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>