> What's the benefit over a well architected library? Especially in a language like Ruby where it's so easy to write DSLs, I don't see where you'd ever want a s

> What's the benefit over a well architected library? Especially in a language like Ruby where it's so easy to write DSLs, I don't see where you'd ever want a scaffold. The benefit, I think, is that scaffolds: * generate a pile of code that you feel free to hack away at, removing and adjusting as you see fit. I don't think scaffolded code is a good candidate for patches, really. It's a shortcut that writes code for you, not a library. * generate code that is customized to your precise needs. For example, when you scaffold something using Rails' default scaffold generator, it creates a database migration and builds the appropriate form fields based on the columns you're using in the model. * are great for generating the kind of code you tend to write over and over. For example, we do lots of custom website development, and a common requirement is the forms for CRUD related to the entities people are managing on these websites. The problem is, the entities are always changing. For an auto dealer, the entities are vehicles, makes, models; for a real estate brokerage they are brokers and properties; etc. We would previously cut and paste code and then modify it, but then we wrote a scaffold generator that builds all the forms for us with all of the appropriate structure and CSS classes and IDs to make them look beautifully integrated.