One of the things that created a lot of early attention for Rails was the scaffolding, which makes it possible to create an instant admin interface for your database tables. While the built-in scaffolding was interesting two years ago, it clearly has received no attention from the core team, which doesn’t use it. It is really pretty horrible; for example:

• The standard CSS is really, really ugly
• It deals with only one table at a time and ignores associations
• It is hard to customize; generally, you end up just stripping it out and replacing it
• It doesn’t use any AJAX

There have been various attempts to build a better solution; the two best-known are Streamlined and Ajax Scaffold. The latter evolved into ActiveScaffold, which yesterday reached a big milestone: version 1.0 was released. I haven’t yet had a chance to deeply evaluate the two against each other, but one thing is clear: there’s no longer any reason to use the standard scaffolding.

Unlike many Rails plugins, ActiveScaffold actually has extensive documentation. I’m looking forward to being able to actually use scaffolding for admin functions now instead of having to build them from scratch. It’s great to be using a framework with such an active developer community that dives in and solves problems such as this one. And, of course, it’s all open source.