What is apply plugin: 'java'

Question

As said in the Gradle documentation, section 6.4:

Gradle's build scripts give you the full power of Groovy.

I come across the following command:

apply plugin: 'java'

I tried to googling to encquire what it means at the Groovy point of view, but I have no idea. Is there a Groovy equivalent at all?

Answer 1

What you see is a syntactic sugar provided by Groovy for a method call. [No braces in method calls & implicit map coercion]

apply plugin: 'java' is same as apply([plugin: 'java'])

apply() is available in Gradle's Project API and project instance is available in Gradle build script by default. (In Groovy terms, operations in build.gradle is delegated to project)