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

Can't you just do

new URL( 'http://username:[email protected]:8983/solr/select?q=*&wt=json' ).text

this is working guys

import java.io.*
import groovyx.net.http.HTTPBuilder
import groovyx.net.http.EncoderRegistry
import static groovyx.net.http.Method.*
import static groovyx.net.http.ContentType.*

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }   
    dependencies {
        classpath 'org.codehaus.groovy.modules.http-builder:http-builder:0.5.2'
    }   
}

task hello {
    def http = new groovyx.net.http.HTTPBuilder("http://local.com:8983/solr/update/json")

    http.request(POST, JSON ) { req ->
        req.body{

        }
        response.success = { resp, reader ->
            println "$resp.statusLine   Respond rec"

        }
    }
}

The easiest way to call REST from groovy without external libraries is executing CURL. Here's an example of calling Artifactory, getting JSON back and parsing it:

import groovy.json.JsonSlurper

task hello {
    def p = ['curl', '-u', '"admin:password"', "\"http://localhost:8081/api/storage/libs-release-local?list&deep=1\""].execute()
    def json = new JsonSlurper().parseText(p.text)
}