From: James Britt Date: 2010-05-15T02:44:27+09:00 Subject: Re: Rake versus Ruby? Mohit Sindhwani wrote: > I was thinking of this on my way home, but could not come up with a good > answer... what is the extra bit that Rake gives me, which I don't get > from a Ruby script? > I'm sorry it's a bit of a naive question, but I was wondering when would > it be more appropriate to use Rake compared to vanilla Ruby! Off the top of my head: * Dependency chain management * Ability to re-use other people's *.rake files * Handy means to get a list of commands That last one is quite useful. I have a habit of knocking out helper scripts for little project tasks, and I end up with a set files whose actual purpose or behavior is not entirely clear. If I move the code into Rake tasks with a decent namespace then I can more easily see what helper code I have by running rake -T | grep my-cool-namespace And I have a global helper script, rt, that calls rake -T and if you pass an argument it will grep the output to filter the results: $ rt # Same as rake -T $ rt jimbo # Same as rake -T | grep jimbo Since your rake files can have plain old Ruby methods in them there's nothing you can do in vanilla Ruby you can't do in Rake, though calling Rake can have some start-up overhead. Oh, and passing command-line arguments in Rake sucks ass. So there are trade-offs. -- James Britt www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys www.ruby-doc.org - Ruby Help & Documentation www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff www.neurogami.com - Smart application development