Gradle, Maven, and Grapes Working Together

For Groovy SPARQL and Spring Jena, I wanted to start leveraging these in little test Groovy scripts running in the console or command line.  At first, I assumed the maven install that happens in their Gradle builds would immediately be picked up by Grape.  However, Grape uses Ant+Ivy, and Ivy does not look in your maven repo by default (doesn't it seem like it should?).

So here are the missing pieces of the puzzle:

1. Setup your Gradle build to create a POM and install your jars into your local maven repo
2. Add  Maven repo support to your Grape configuration.  Grape configuration is in ~/.groovy/grapeConfig.xml - and it's an Ivy file in disguise.  See [*] below for an example which is down near the bottom of the Grape documentation.
3. Install your POM artifacts into Grape.  For Groovy SPARQL, the command is:    grape install org.codehaus.groovy.sparql groovy-sparql 0.1
4. Now you can use Grape, e.g. @Grab('org.codehaus.groovy.sparql:groovy-sparql:0.1')

You can also use grape list to see what jars are now available.

All in all, this makes tools like the Groovy Console an excellent REPL for both Java, Groovy, and presumably other Java polyglot programming.

 * Here is the sample grapeConfig.xml file from the Groovy documentation.