Jon writes about a build system he put together using Ruby. Scripts in Jon’s system look alot like normal programs. Tasks are defined like a normal Ruby method, but a target_method command marks that method as special. These special commands are only executed once, no matter how many times they are called.

It’s a clever and remarkably simple approach.

Jon also describes a technique he uses to interface with ant to build a Java program. Details are a little sketchy, but I wonder if it is something that could be used with Rake.