groovy - Gradle Script To call a REST Web service without any 3rd party plugins, any pointers?

Question

Hi I need to call a REST service as part of the buildscript (Gradle) without any 3rd party plugins, how could I use Groovy to do that?

(My first attempt)

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}
      dependencies {  
            complie "org.codehaus.groovy.modules.http-builder:http-builder:0.5.2"  
    }  

task hello {
    def http = new HTTPBuilder("http://myserver.com:8983/solr/select?q=*&wt=json")
    http.auth.basic 'username', 'password'
    http.request(GET, JSON ) { req ->
    }
}

Answer 1

Can't you just do

new URL( 'http://username:password@myserver.com:8983/solr/select?q=*&wt=json' ).text