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Your thoughts on using Rails scaffold generators

I'm attempting to learn Ruby on Rails. I'm pretty confident with the basics and writing my own models, controllers and views, although I only know the basics.

Lately I've found that, when I start a new application, most of my models nicely fit into the REST philosophy, and I end up just writing most of the same scaffold-generated code by hand anyways. In a case like this, do you think it would be acceptable to start from using script/generate scaffold for each of my required models, and then modifying code as necessary? The prevailing opinion that I've seen seems to be that the scaffolding is a "newbie trick" and real developers don't use it, but for most applications it seems to create a fair chunk of usable code (as opposed to bad code).

What are your thoughts?

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Wayne Molina Avatar asked Mar 24 '09 15:03

Wayne Molina


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1 Answers

I'm not sure if the culture is really against scaffolding or not, but I, for one, love it.

Now, what I do know is that there was sort of a small backlash against scaffolding for a while. This was because basically every Rails tutorial was basically 'whoa, just type

ruby script/generate scaffolding Post title:string body:text

and you have a blog! Done!'

This not actually being the case, the community started to pull back on using scaffolding as that kind of example, because when you do this, you're not done.

The real power of scaffolding, and the reason that I love it, is for its rapid prototyping abilities. You can generate half of your web site, start coding the back end, and still have a usable interface to actually play around with how everything works without worrying about writing interface code.

like image 81
Steve Klabnik Avatar answered Sep 22 '22 12:09

Steve Klabnik