What is scaffolding? Is it a term for a particular platform?

Question

Scaffolding, what is it? Is it a Rails-only thing?

Answer 1

I believe that Wikipedia and some answers here provides a narrow and restricted view. Scaffolding is not just for CRUD operations on top of a database. Scaffolding has a broader objective to give you a skeleton app for any kind of technology.

Yeoman is a modern and useful tool for scaffolding. Using their own words:

The web's scaffolding tool for modern webapps

What's Yeoman?

Yeoman helps you to kickstart new projects, prescribing best practices and tools to help you stay productive.

To do so, we provide a generator ecosystem. A generator is basically a plugin that can be run with the yo command to scaffold complete projects or useful parts.

Through our official Generators, we promote the "Yeoman workflow". This workflow is a robust and opinionated client-side stack, comprising tools and frameworks that can help developers quickly build beautiful web applications. We take care of providing everything needed to get started without any of the normal headaches associated with a manual setup.

With a modular architecture that can scale out of the box, we leverage the success and lessons learned from several open-source communities to ensure the stack developers use is as intelligent as possible.

As firm believers in good documentation and well thought out build processes, Yeoman includes support for linting, testing, minification and much more, so developers can focus on solutions rather than worrying about the little things.

That's it. Use scaffolding to create a quick-start application to work as an example or the foundation of your solution. It makes you productive faster them building things from scratch.