It’s funny. Doing the most basic things in Rails are really simple. If you’ve seen the intro to rails demo video, you know what I’m talking about. But, scaffolding is really only about 1% of the magic of Rails.

The funny thing is… the scaffolding in the video is what drew many of us to the upstart framework in the first place. It just made things look so easy.

Of course, it was also the scaffolding that confused many of the initial critics of RoR.

Many of these critics, who didn’t take a hard enough look at Rails, thought its magic lay in the scaffolding. Silly detractors, scaffolding is for kids!

Note for non-techies: scaffolding is basically throw-away code that helps you rapidly prototype the functionality of an app.

The Magic of Rails != Its Nifty Scaffolding Feature

Once you spend a good amount of time developing a complex Rails application, you see first-hand that scaffolding is just a very, very tiny part of the framework.

Much has been written about this before, but the beauty of Rails lies in abstracting away the dull, boring parts of coding and development … allowing you to focus on the good stuff—fixing bugs and adding features!

Another great thing about Rails is that you can follow the rabbit hole just about as far down as you’d like.

There’s always something new on the horizon, such as integration tests and Selenium (JavaScript-powered, browser-based) acceptance testing.

That magic feeling …. of actually loving to code!

Really digging into Rails makes me feel like I did back when I first learned Java for the first time. PHP never made me feel that way.

With Rails, that loving, magic feeling I used to have for programming is back! Yeah, baby.