Michael Slater 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 … 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: <ul> <li>The standard CSS is really, really ugly</li> <li>It deals with only one table at a time and ignores associations</li> <li>It is hard to customize; generally, you end up just stripping it out and replacing it</li> <li>It doesn’t use any AJAX</li> </ul> There have been various attempts to build a better solution; the two best-known are <a href="http://www.streamlinedframework.org">Streamlined</a> and Ajax Scaffold. The latter evolved into <a href="http://www.activescaffold.com">ActiveScaffold</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.activescaffold.com/docs/">extensive documentation</a>. 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. 2008-07-24T01:00:46-07:00

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Better Rails Scaffolding

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