Re: Is the rails 2.0 scaffold system philosophically ( not t

On Mar 3, 3:47 pm, "Brian Hogan" <bpho...@...> wrote:
>  This just described why I think scaffolding is bad. It indirectly forces
> newcomers to do things a specific way.  If you use the scaffolding, you
> start building controllers based off the code there.  If you learned to
> create a controller and views without the scaffolding, you'd be more free to
> do things as you see fit.

Well, it's not just scaffolding. Rails is a framework, not a general
purpose programming language, very specific to the goals it was
created to achieve. As such it is meant to behave one way or the other
until you decide to hack it. I think that for a newbie it is more
important to limit the choices and learn one way of doing things. If s/
he is diligent enough, Rails can always be made to do things
differently, or you can simply _not_ use Rails at all. That, with
respect to what Brian said, is the way I feel framework should work:
limiting choices instead of flooding you with unnecessary
abstractions.

Besides, I think this is not a problem with how scaffolding works in
general, but the transition between the non-REST and RESTful
scaffolder.

> Railes substitues proper "getting started" documentation for scaffolded code
> generation which makes it really tough on newcomers.   People who've been
> doing Rails as long as I have don't really care because we don't use
> scaffolding. However, I work with newbies all the time and it's much easier
> to start them on Rails 1.x and move to Rails 2.0 and REST later. The
> original scaffold generator was very good for explaining how controllers
> work with models and views. link_to used a hash and not a named route. Named
> routes are cool, but they are confusing to a newbie. Same with respond_to.

Well, you have to admit that may not apply to all newcomers. As for
myself, I believe I would have grasped the new way of working much
faster have I not used Rails before. It is, admittedly, a bit harder
to find tutorials for 2.0 at this moment, but that is changing
rapidly. In a few months, I think a newcomer will find it much easier
to start with Rails 2.0.
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