Groovy-DDLUtils

Apache DDLUtils is a small but very useful library for migrating data and translating SQL schemas from one SQL database to another. DDLUtils includes support for an impressive list of SQL dialects, including all the major commercial and open-source RDBMS products.

The DDLUtils project provides a jar file containing the library code and a set of Ant tasks that use the library to perform common tasks - exporting a schema from a live database to a text file, and importing a schema from a text file to a live database. I haven't written an Ant XML build file for several years, and after some time away I find the Ant XML very verbose and cumbersome to work with.

Looking for an easier and more accessible way harness the power of DDLUtils, I turned to Groovy. Groovy scripts are a great way to leverage Java APIs in an expressive way, often with just a few lines of code. After using a few special-purpose Groovy scripts with DDLUtils, I decided to generalize the script to make it more configuration-driven and therefore more usable. The result is the Groovy-DDLUtils project.

The Groovy-DDLUtils project page on GitHub includes documentation on using and customizing the Groovy script, so I won't repeat that here. Take a look, give it a try, and send any feedback or enhancements suggestions via issues on GitHub, or comments on this blog.

Wrapping a Groovy script with Gradle

Groovy is great for scripting Java APIs in a very simple and expressive way. Providing utilities written in Groovy can sometimes be met with resistance, as any user of such a script first needs to download the appropriate version of Groovy and any other jar file dependencies. Grape helps with the dependency problem, but relies on all jar file dependencies being in a dependency repository, and the user of the script having access to a repository.

The Cookbook section of the Groovy site includes a script called WrappingGroovyScript that solves the Groovy and external jar dependency problems. As the page says, WrappingGroovyScript creates a self-contained jar file with your Groovy script, the Groovy runtime, and all other dependencies nicely bundled together. A user of your utility can then just run the generated jar using "java -jar". Very nice.

Then I got started thinking that Gradle should be able to do the same type of bundling for Groovy scripts. Here is a Gradle script that accomplishes that goal.


To use the script, just copy the contents of the Gist into your own build.gradle file, change the mainClassName, and add your dependencies.

That's it! Very simple and elegant, even smaller than the WrappingGroovyScript solution.