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?
Scaffold-generator is a scaffolding utility used to automate project creation from the specified template and data. Scaffold-generator could be the core utility to create something like grunt-init and yeoman generators.
Rails generators are command line tools that are used for automating the process of creating or editing files with boiler plate code. In essence, they execute Ruby code much like a script and create or update files based on templates, user input and whatever logic necessary.
To generate a fully working scaffold for a new object, including model, controller, views, assets, and tests, use the rails g scaffold command. Then you can run rake db:migrate to set up the database table. Then you can visit http://localhost:3000/widgets and you'll see a fully functional CRUD scaffold.
Rails scaffolding is a quick way to generate some of the major pieces of an application. If you want to create the models, views, and controllers for a new resource in a single operation, scaffolding is the tool for the job.
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.
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