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?
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.