Your thoughts on using Rails scaffold generators

Question

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?

Answer 1

I think the idea is that you use it to generate 'generic' code, and then rewrite/refactor it to your specific requirements.

I think there is no problem using the code out of the box generator if it does what you want - as long as you remember what it all does from a security point of view (e.g. don't leave in edit/update/destroy actions if you don't want your interface to allow this)

One thing I like, to avoid lots of duplicate generated code, is the make_resourceful plug in - it abstracts the duplicate default code and lets you override it as appropriate.

Answer 2

It is a myth that scaffold is meant only for newbies. It is a great tool to kick start you application really quickly. Of course you will need to modify the generated code to suit your requirements. Having said that, it never hurts to have a ready -made code, most of which will be used as is.

Answer 3

Rails' fanatical devotion to choosing smart defaults is exactly why you observe that when you hand write code it ends up looking like the code generated by scaffolding. Personally I really enjoy using scaffolds because there's only a couple of tweaks needed at the end (layouts, CSS, validations, etc etc) for those really basic CRUD type operations.

Even when you get to things that are more complex, it's easy to start from a scaffold and move towards what you want. Definitely not just a newbie's tool.

Answer 4

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.