Building a ServiceLoader file with gradle: howto?

I am starting to switch from a well-known Java build system to Gradle to build all my projects, and after barely two hours into it I have already been able to publish a new version of one of my projects without a problem -- a breeze.

But now I encounter a difficulty. In short, I need to replicate the functionality of this Maven plugin which generates the necessary files for a ServiceLoader-enabled service.

In short: given a base class foo.bar.MyClass, it generates a file named META-INF/services/foo.bar.MyClass whose content is a set of classes in the current project which implement that interface/extend that base class. Such a file would look like:

com.mycompany.MyClassImpl
org.othercompany.MyClassImpl

In order to do this, it uses I don't know what as a classloader, loads the Class objects for com.myCompany.MyClassImpl or whatever and checks whether this class implements the wanted interface.

I am trying to do the same in Gradle. Hours of googling led me to this plugin, but after discussing with its author a little, it appears this plugin is able to merge such files, not create them. So, I have to do that myself...

And I am a real beginner both with Gradle and Groovy, which does not help! Here is my current code, link to the full build.gradle here; output (which I managed to get somehow; doesn't work from a clean dir) shown below (and please bear with me... I do Java, and I am final happy; Groovy is totally new to me):

/*
 * TEST CODE
 */

final int CLASS_SUFFIX = ".class".length();
final URLClassLoader classLoader = this.class.classLoader;
// Where the classes are: OK
final File classesDir = sourceSets.main.output.classesDir;
final String basePath = classesDir.getCanonicalPath();

// Add them to the classloader: OK
classLoader.addURL(classesDir.toURI().toURL())

// Recurse over each file
classesDir.eachFileRecurse {
    // You "return" from a closure, you do not "continue"...
    if (!isPotentialClass(it))
        return;

    // Transform into a class name
    final String path = it.getAbsolutePath();
    final String name = path.substring(basePath.length() + 1);
    final String className = name.substring(0, name.length() - CLASS_SUFFIX)
        .replace('/', '.');

    // Try and load it
    try {
        classLoader.loadClass(className);
        println(className);
    } catch (NoClassDefFoundError ignored) {
        println("failed to load " + className + ": " + ignored);
    }
}

boolean isPotentialClass(final File file)
{
    return file.isFile() && file.name.endsWith(".class")
}

The output:

com.github.fge.msgsimple.InternalBundle
failed to load com.github.fge.msgsimple.bundle.MessageBundle: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/github/fge/Frozen
failed to load com.github.fge.msgsimple.bundle.MessageBundleBuilder: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/github/fge/Thawed
com.github.fge.msgsimple.bundle.PropertiesBundle$1
com.github.fge.msgsimple.bundle.PropertiesBundle
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.MessageSourceProvider
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.LoadingMessageSourceProvider$1
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.LoadingMessageSourceProvider$2
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.LoadingMessageSourceProvider$3
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.LoadingMessageSourceProvider$Builder
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.LoadingMessageSourceProvider
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.MessageSourceLoader
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.StaticMessageSourceProvider$Builder
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.StaticMessageSourceProvider$1
com.github.fge.msgsimple.provider.StaticMessageSourceProvider
com.github.fge.msgsimple.source.MessageSource
com.github.fge.msgsimple.source.MapMessageSource$Builder
com.github.fge.msgsimple.source.MapMessageSource$1
com.github.fge.msgsimple.source.MapMessageSource
com.github.fge.msgsimple.source.PropertiesMessageSource
com.github.fge.msgsimple.locale.LocaleUtils
com.github.fge.msgsimple.serviceloader.MessageBundleFactory
com.github.fge.msgsimple.serviceloader.MessageBundleProvider
:compileJava UP-TO-DATE

The problem is in the two first lines: Frozen and Thawed are in a different project, which is in the compile classpath but not in the classpath I managed to grab so far... As such, these classes cannot even load.

How do I modify that code so as to have the full compile classpath availabe? Is my first question. Second question: how do I plug that code, when it works, into the build process?

Solution

Here are some hints:

Create a new URLClassLoader, rather than reusing an existing one.
Initialize the class loader with sourceSets.main.compileClasspath (which is an Iterable<File>) rather than classesDir.
Turn the code into a Gradle task class. For more information, see "Writing a simple task class" in the Gradle User Guide.

Ideally, you'd use a library like ASM to analyze the code, rather than using a class loader. To avoid the case where you cannot load a class because it internally references a class that's not on the compile class path, you may want to initialize the class loader with sourceSets.main.runtimeClasspath instead.