Missed the point: Rake is not a custom-made tool for Rails

As there’s still a lot of links cumulated on Ruby and Rails I have to walk through (and am about to blog about), I am glad to be able to present you today what I learned about Rails and Rake. Apparently, it’s a common mis-assumption, Rake were made for Rails.
 

To get an impression of what’s getting generated when performing the first few steps of setting up a Rails project, I did what might be best in a situation like that — I explored the project tree Rails generates. By that it took not much effort to stumble upon Rake — Ruby’s Make. But what stopped me cold was the insight, Rake is actually older than Rails. Until then I knew Rake only by being used in setting up a Rails project, therefore I believed, Rake might be a custom-made tool for Rails. Nevertheless, it is not: Rails was released in 2004, while Rake was presented in 2003 already. A guy named Jim Weirich created Rake after joking around with a colleague about implementing a Make in Ruby, just to overcome hassles in a contumacious Make. Originally, it was just somewhat funny to re-create Make using Ruby, and it was done in less than an hour. His … colleague came up with the Rake naming. As Weirich tells the tale of Rake’s early days far better than this summary, I recommend you to read it yourself. It’s humorous and really worth the read. Also worth a read is Martin Fowler’s introduction to Rake from August 2005. — As Rake became that common in Rails projects, you might imagine that some peple really love Rake. At least one of them do so that much that Nicholas Seckar figured out a way to integrate Rake with Bash so that auto-completion for works tasks Rake can perform (also known as “targets”). Aside of these anecdotes, personally I wonder which might been the history of Rake and Rails and how they met with each other and how the decision has been made to distribute them together — or at least Rails with Rake.

Update: I overlooked one interesting project when posting the precedent paragraph — Rush. That is a replacement for the usual command line shell. It’s Ruby Shell.