Using rake with a non-ruby project
Question
A workmate floated the idea of using rake as a build system for a non-ruby project. Is it possible to extend rake to compliment other languages where the autoconf toolset would usually be used?
OTHER TIPS
You can find how to use Rake as an easy replacement for Makefile in the manual...
I use it almost exlusevely for build that I write myself... If you use Java better choice would be Ant and Maven - they have a lot of code behind them... But, as for me, you have to be a little brainf*ed to program in XML, so I often use Rake for many task, and invoke it from Ant/Maven, like that:
<target name="custom_task">
<exec executable="/usr/bin/env">
<arg value="rake"/>
<arg value="some-task"/>
<arg value="param" />
</exec>
</target>
It may not be super efficient, especially if you have to run anything on the JVM it can't use Ant's, so it is not the best idea... I haven't tried JRuby, maybe it would be worth trying... But for other task - filehandling, doing something with text files, etc. it works really nice for me :-)
I use it to deploy (Capistrano) on several non-Rails projects. One Java (servlet) and several static HTML sites.
Very handy.
I use it to compile Flex applications. I've written wrappers around the Flex SDK command line tools -- it's easy to do for any tool chain that can be called from the command line.