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

Question

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

Answer 1

Just like a real scaffolding in a building construction site, scaffolding gives you some kind of a (fast, simplified, temporary) structure for your project, on which you can rely to build the real project.

It can be (and is today) used to describe many things - from abstracting DB layers, to web apps folder structures, and to generating and managing project dependencies .

It is not something that is specific to any language / technology, just like the term skeleton or boilerplate is platform agnostic.

It is just a term borrowed from real scaffolding (like mentioned above). You build some fast, simplified, (sometimes external, sometimes temporary) structure that will help you to build the real, more complex, finalized structure under, above, inside or outside of that temporary structure .

.. And just like the real scaffolding, the scaffolding structure is meant to support the building process of the project, rather than the project itself (with some exceptions).