In my experience, scaffolding is a crutch for people unfamiliar with Rails. In my connections with experienced Rails devs, I've hardly ever heard of anyone who uses it.
Only time scaffolding comes up in the irc channel, forums, etc, is when beginners ask how they can make scaffolding do X, and the answer is always that you don't, scaffolding is a temporary crutch, just like the name implies. And, experienced Rails devs don't use it, not even temporarily.
So it's probably a completely useless website for experienced Rails devs, while potentially being quite helpful to beginners. An important step towards becoming well versed in Rails is to drop that crutch, though. IMHO, focusing on scaffolding basically keeps you from really immersing yourself in Rails.
I think that most of the spots where scaffolding could be useful to experienced devs, a higher level abstraction that does its generating at runtime is much better. It can be difficult to get right, but you end up with more power, better reusability, and less code to maintain overall.
I think as community is growing there are more people turning towards RoR from other technologies, because:
1. Ruby is language of developers
2. With Rails building application is pretty fast.
I think I have attended a session 4 years back (when I was nuby) when one guy taken user requirements and generated rails app in few hours through scaffolds (and I must tell you it was very inspiring). Though it was just a skeleton and not at all production ready, but at least gives sponsors a feel of application what they envision and in turn they provide quick feedback.
So, I think scaffolds are still useful to provide you bunch of useful files, which otherwise you write by hand.
Scaffolds are a fine way to learn the Rails conventions, but in several years of doing security assessments in the codebases of some of the world's largest Rails apps, I have never once noticed one being used. Professional Rails developers seem to shun them as a rule.
I actually saw scaffolding as a crutch when I started learning Rails and therefore made the conscience decision to learn the framework without using it. I think the time investment paid back dividends, and I don't usually recommend that beginners (or anyone) use scaffolding. Instead, I recommend studying a simple, open source example app.
Long-time Rails developer here (since 2006). From the very beginning, the scaffolds that came with Rails were seen as code that was not production-ready. They were mainly for prototyping.
I still use scaffolds to this day as my first step when building a greenfield app. Of course, I always revisit the code before I consider it production-ready, but it saves me time when taking the first step.
I think we should be careful not to confuse the scaffolds that come with Rails with the more general idea of code generators. Code generators are not bad; it's how you use them. If you use them to generate code that you never intend to review or understand, then yes, they are a crutch. Otherwise, they are a time-saving head-start or a great learning tool.
what about cases where the functionality you need is such basic CRUD that scaffolding speeds up your workflow?
i can write scaffolding from scratch, but i appreciate it as a useful boilerplate for when i'm fleshing out an initial iteration. i can't tell if "i never scaffold" is just vogue or if there really are no use-cases for it if you want to claim proficiency.
the code it generates seems pretty basic, trivial, and even idiomatic. (not a fan of the view code, though)
It really depends. I don't use scaffolding if I would just replace it anyway. But: I do find it convenient for apps where I don't want to write (and therefore re-invent) data display views, like activescaffold provides (or used to provide?).
You know - scaffolding is what attracted many people to Rails in the first place. Well, not scaffolding per se, but the idea that it takes care of boilerplate for you.
This is two non sequitur points in two small grafs.
Lack of boilerplate is one of the things that attracts people to Rails and it is one of the things that keep people there. Scaffolding isn't what provides that benefit. Scaffolding is. boilerplate. What eliminates boilerplate is the "Convention Over Configuration" mentality behind Rails, which is in full force today.
Rails in 2011 is if anything less bloated than Rails was in 2007; post-Merb, it's been made modular and had much of its magic goop factored out.
I'm getting the feeling that you don't do much Rails dev.
A lot of people were attracted to Rails for a lot of different reasons, but it's pretty clear that people who stay with it and become proficient basically tend to ignore the scaffolding feature altogether.
The people you speak of maybe didn't stay with it because Rails doesn't really live up to those expectations.
Only time scaffolding comes up in the irc channel, forums, etc, is when beginners ask how they can make scaffolding do X, and the answer is always that you don't, scaffolding is a temporary crutch, just like the name implies. And, experienced Rails devs don't use it, not even temporarily.
So it's probably a completely useless website for experienced Rails devs, while potentially being quite helpful to beginners. An important step towards becoming well versed in Rails is to drop that crutch, though. IMHO, focusing on scaffolding basically keeps you from really immersing yourself in Rails.