filtering external files (sass, coffeescript, etc)

[bloo]

I saw a few posts in this group from Matt Raible about filtering external files (coffeescript, to be precise), and the responses about different ways to "slice and dice" it. They were from 2 years ago, so I was curious if there has been any new development, best practices, or experiences in this area. I'm not using Play, so I can't use their modules - but if they're the best implementation of this sort of thing, maybe I should borrow code from that module? I was looking at using scalate-jruby's Sass object directly but wanted to query the group before I went down that path.