CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki1b 9 ss

Scaffolding in Web application frameworks

Topic :We have discussed scaffolds for Ruby on Rails. The dynamic scaffold of Rails 1.x was replaced in Rails 2 by a generator of scaffolds for specific tables. Why did this change take place? What are the pros and cons of dynamic scaffolds? Many languages other than Ruby (Java, Python, and PHP, for example) provide Web application frameworks. Do any of these languages have the equivalent of scaffolding? If so, how does it compare to Rails?

The concept of Scaffolding

Scaffolding in web frameworks allow a software developer to create data-driven web applications quickly by automating CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) data operations. It achieves this by generating pages for the models within the MVC architecture of the application that have a working data form that can communicate with the database. This allows the developer to get an early look at the data presented in the application as a raw design from which they can build, modify, or rework the application in order to achieve a final product.

For the young developer, scaffolding has the advantage of quickly and easily building a working database driven application. It also shows the developer what kinds of methods and logic must be present within the applications controllers in order to produce a successful product. Scaffolding is a pragmatic tool to help young developers learn about creating web applications.

For the experienced developer, scaffolding gives them fast access to viewing and editing pages. With this the experienced developer can then customize the application through the use of metadata, templates, overriding the scaffold actions with custom ones, or they may use the quickly generated build as a rough draft from which they will write their own structure.

Scaffolding has become very popular within in the web development community and therefore is showing up in several web frameworks. This is mostly because it increases work flow and it allows web designers to spend more time designing instead of building interfaces to data. Scaffolding has become so wide spread that it can be found in such frameworks as Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET.