Jerbil FAQ

How does Rake+Jerbil compare to Ant ?

Jerbil is just a set of extensions (tasklibs) for Rake, the build system used in most Ruby projects. Rake's syntax is a lot cleaner than Ant's XML based build files. At the same time it provides the developer with a fully-featured programming environment, so things like conditions and branches don't have to be expressed as XML markup. See Martin Fowler's article for a good introduction. Most of the jerbil tasks (such as compiling, testing) run in one single Java VM, which makes jerbil very fast.

Why didn't you use JRuby ?

You actually get a lot more flexibility when loading the JVM from within CRuby, as opposed to loading Rake from JRuby. In a JRuby scenario, by the time Rake gets executed the JVM has already been fully initialised, so you no longer have control over the bootstrapping process (classpath setup etc.). I'm sure there're ways to work around that, and JRuby's Java "integration" is obviously a lot more advanced than in Rjb.

Is this actually used somewhere ?

We use it for our in-house software development, see Springy for an example.