Question

In simple terms, what does Rake do? What purposes does it have? I understand it’s a build tool but I’m looking a bit more detail.

Answer 1

Try Martin Fowler’s article on Rake for more information:

http://martinfowler.com/articles/rake.html

His pre-amble is:

Rake is a build language, similar in purpose to make and ant. Like make and ant it’s a Domain Specific Language, unlike those two it’s an internal DSL programmed in the Ruby language. In this article I introduce rake and describe some interesting things that came out of my use of rake to build this web site: dependency models, synthesized tasks, custom build routines and debugging the build script.

There is more information available on or linked from the project’s home page as well:

http://rake.rubyforge.org/