Tuesday 2 December 2008

Fowler on Rake

A quote from wonderful article:

So far I've found rake to be a powerful and easy to use build language. Of course it helps that I'm comfortable in ruby, but rake has convinced me that a build system makes sense as an internal DSL to full-blown language. Scripts are a natural for building stuff in many ways, and rake adds just enough features to provide a really good build system on top of a fine language. We also have the advantage that ruby is an open source language that runs on all the platforms that I need.

I was surprised by the consequences of flexible dependency specification. It allowed me to do a number of things that reduced duplication - which I think will allow me to make it easier to maintain my build scripts in the future. I found several common functions that I pulled out into a separate file and shared between the build scripts for martinfowler.com and refactoring.com.

If you're automating builds you should take a look at rake. Remember that you can use it for any environment, not just ruby.

Rake forever :)

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