What's the advantage of making a Sinatra/Rack app into a single, locally-executable file?

Question

I was reading the description of Vegas, which is a gem that

aims to solve the simple problem of creating executable versions of Sinatra/Rack apps.

I didn't know this was a problem that needed to be solved.

The reason this seems of dubious benefit is because of this:

Now if you run ./my_app it should:

    * find an appropriate rack handler (thin. mongrel)
    * find an available port
    * launch the app in a browser
    * put itself in the background
    * write a .pid and a .url file

Isn't it already extremely easy to run a Sinatra application? You just type

ruby my_app.rb

and all of those same things happen except for the app being a background process.

Why do you need an executable file for this?

Answer 1

Sounds to me like a convenience wrapper around Sinatra/Rack, except for daemonizing (.pid and .url are most likely to "find" it again) and launching a browser this doesn't seem to have any advantage over bare Sinatra/Rack.