Which non-ruby projects use Rake?

Question

I have recently started using Rake for my personal projects, mainly because I am not into make anymore and prefer to avoid learning a custom language just for builds.

However, based on a quick google, there don't seem to be any many non-ruby projects using rake. And certainly none with any recall value.

Am I right? Are there any non ruby projects using Rake? And why is rake lagging behind?

EDIT: By lagging behind, why are there no major opensource project using Rake? What does Rake lack vs Cmake, for instance?

Answer 1

Buildr is a framework of Rake tasks that is explicitly designed as a replacement for Ant and Maven to build Java applications. I know that at least the guys who wrote Buildr actually use it to build their Java projects, plus I heard of several other people and companies using either Buildr or raw Rake for Java. I also heard the same about C#.

I also know some Ruby companies that have branched out into other fields (Objective-C, JavaScript) and took Rake with them to build their mobile projects, for example.

And of course, depending on whether you define that as a non-Ruby project or not, IronRuby uses Rake for building. You could obviously argue that this is a Ruby project, but it's not Ruby code, it's 99% C# and a dash of XML.

There was also a talk a couple of years ago at one of the regional Ruby conferences about an embedded company that uses test/unit for testing and Rake for building their C and even assembly code.

On the same vein, I believe Atomic Objects uses Rake for their embedded work.

Answer 2

I run an open source project called Albacore: http://albacorebuild.net hosted on github: http://github.com/derickbailey/albacore

this project provides .NET developers with a suite of rake tasks for building their .NET systems. there are more than 5K downloads of albacore from rubygems.org.

i personally know of several multinational corporations that are using rake and albacore (one of them being a very large financial institute), along with several large scale enterprises, at least one of the leading agile project management products, and many of my friends and of course my own work in .net

i think there is a growing interest in using rake, at least in the .net community. i can't speak for java or c/c++ or anything else, though.

i think rake will never be as big as we might want it to be, outside of the ruby community, though. this is in part because many people want to stick with the language that they work in already, so people in .net tend to use build tools that are written in .net, etc. but there will always be a contingent of developers that want to best tool for the job and will find languages and tools outside of what they use.

Answer 3

At my current job, we have used Rake to build .Net web applications. We did find that most developers already had experience with the problems of nant and MSBuild and that learning Ruby for Rake was sometimes a higher price than suffering the problems of nant or MSBuild. Plus, it was one less dependency for the build system.

But when we did use it, it was really nice, especially when we setup our own internal gem server.

Answer 4

rake has a ruby dependency, make doesn't (pretty much). You see rake sometimes in java or .net projects, but that is mostly because the de-facto standard build tools on both environments use a terrible xml based syntax which is a pain to write, and even harder to maintain, but usually platforms end up gravitating towards build tools that integrate well with the platform.