Why do Ruby on Rails professionals NOT use Scaffolding?

Question

I read sometimes from people that seem to be working with rails since longer, that one important lesson they learnt would be \"Don\'t use scaffolding\". Also on irc I read c

Answer 1

Scaffolding isn't really meant for production use. It's meant to get an application bootstrapped quickly and then it can be modified or done away with.

The Rails 3 scaffolding is actually pretty decent, but it still lacks some things like a way to handle nested resources and it doesn't use the simpler respond_with (over respond_to, which encourages verbosity where it isn't needed or welcome).

It's unlikely that the default scaffold forms will work un-modified, either — you probably have relationships between your models that translate to a column in the database like user_id. When creating a scaffold of a model with a relationship, this column shows up as a text field in the form when clearly it should be inferred from the URL or selected via another, more user-friendly, interface.

There are a lot of small details like this that make scaffolding a really unlikely candidate for production-ready-out-of-the-box code. You can certainly build an application by generating the scaffold and then filling in the gaps and cleaning up areas you don't need, though, and I suspect most Rails developers do this to some extent.