ActiveScaffold - the best thing since dynamically self-slicing bread
Posted by Johnnie
How have I missed this? Why did nobody tell me about Active Scaffold before now?
Most of my Rails apps site on a CRUD backend, which I usually generate using Rails built-in scaffold, just to get things going. Inevitably, I’ll rewrite 9/10 of the code, because the default scaffold is clunky and decidedly non-scaleable.
ActiveScaffold scales like vectored gold. What’s more, it reads your Models and dynamically generates an AJAX-powered CRUD interface for them, including their relationships. So, if your Farmer model has_many :cows, and your Cow model belongs_to :farmer, you’ll find the ability to create a new Cow, or add an existing one, has been baked in to the interface for creating a new Farmer. Awesome.
As if that wasn’t enough brilliance for one day, ActiveScaffold is easily extendable with plugins. My favourite so far is ActiveScaffoldFileColumnBridge, which provides sweet integration between tt>ActiveScaffold and FileColumn. You don’t even have to grok FileColumn’s weird syntax requirements – all the work is done for you.
Man, this was a productive day. When i think of the amount of time this is going to save me, I get a little giggly. Half my development time would often be spent on the application backend, especially since my woeful FileColumn integration always seemed to break any unit testing that was thrown at it. No more! Cleverer people than me have written the code so I don’t have to! Hooray for open source!