Chapter 4. Scaffolding

For centuries, scaffolding has helped builders provide access and support to buildings through the early stages of the construction process. Programmers, too, use temporary scaffolding code to lend structure and support until more permanent code is available. Rails automates scaffolding to make early coding more productive than ever before.

In almost any Ruby on Rails demonstration of five minutes or more, you're likely to see scaffolding. Rails opponents dismiss the feature quickly, saying that any scaffolding code must be thrown away, so the advantages are artificial. In some ways, the detractors are right. Scaffolding user interfaces are ugly and incomplete. But scaffolding provides more than cheap demo thrills. Here are some benefits:

• You can quickly get code in front of your users for feedback.

• You are motivated by faster success.

• You can learn how Rails works by looking at generated code.

• You can use the scaffolding as a foundation to jumpstarts your development.

• You can use metaprogramming that's automatically updated as the structure in the database changes.

In this chapter, we'll show how to use scaffolding to build a primitive user interface for Photo Share. Then, in later chapters, we will extend that foundation to flesh out our application.