Here’s a neat way of using ivy with jruby, rake & ant.

task :ivy_retrieve do
  ant.taskdef :resource => "org/apache/ivy/ant/antlib.xml" do
    classpath :location => "ivy/ivy-2.2.0.jar"
  end
  ant.configure :file => "ivy/ivysettings.xml"
  ant.resolve :file => "ivy/ivy.xml"
  ant.retrieve :pattern => "lib/[conf]/[type]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]", :sync => "true"
  puts
end

Still using ant, still angle bracket free (except for ivy, sigh). Read my previous post if you want to know more about jruby, rake and ant.