Using Groovy to keep your Maven and Fitnesse dependencies in sync

The problem

What if you’re working with Maven, where you’ve got all your dependencies nicely organised, and now you decide to use any other piece of ‘classpath-aware’ software, like Fitnesse. The chances are that you’ll need to use the same classpath in Fitnesse as in Maven. A possible solution could be to maintain it by hand, but why not write a very small script for it to do it for you? My (very very very!) basic solution is to use a Groovy, because it’s easy to write, easy to read, and easy to use!

The solution

def pom = new XmlSlurper().parse("pom.xml")
pom.dependencies.dependency.each { dependency ->
        println "!path \${mavenRepo}/${dependency.groupId}/${dependency.artifact
Id}/${dependency.version}/${dependency.artifactId}-${dependency.version}.jar"
}

Et voila: a very small script to keep track of the Maven dependencies and export them in a format which is suiteable for Fitnesse. Mind the ${maveRepo} though: it’s the name of a system property which has been supplied in the run.sh when starting Fitnesse, and points to your Maven repository (which is ${USER}/.m2/repository)
Well, I hope will make your life a little easier, and ofcourse you can do all kinds of nifty things with it, like turning it into a Maven plugin or something………