[Techtalk] Make replacement

[jennyw]

Hi, Kathryn!

Rake can be used generally -- it's not just for Ruby-related tasks. The 
same is true with Ant, by the way. Martin Fowler wrote an article about 
Rake that includes this paragraph:

      > Although rake is written in ruby, there's no reason why you
      > can't use it to build applications written in other
      > languages. Any build language is a scripting language for
      > building stuff, and you can happily build one environment
      > using tools written in another. (A good example was when we
      > used ant to build a Microsoft COM project, we just had to
      > hide it from the Microsoft consultant.) The only thing with
      > rake is that it's useful to know ruby in order to do more
      > advanced things, but I've always felt that any professional
      > programmer needs to know at least one scripting languages to
      > get all sort of odd-jobs done.

Original article: http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/rake.html

Rake is essentially a make-inspired domain-specific language (DSL) built 
on top of Ruby.  There's also a younger Ruby project called Rant that's 
also a make replacement.

Some URLs:

http://docs.rubyrake.org/ (Rake docs)
http://rake.rubyforge.org/ (Rake home)
http://make.rubyforge.org/ (Rant home)

Jen