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Comment by dogas | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a great idea, but mainly because it provides a template for the best practices when implementing a particular item, like file uploading or infinite scrolling.

Given that, I'd love to see the code for these scaffolds directly on the site, with an explanation about what it's doing and why it's doing it that way, as well as the ability to comment on a particular implementation. I would think that type of community-driven peer-reviewed best practices for common feature implementations would be very valuable indeed.

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As a fledgling rails developer, this is the thing that will make this site for me.

My reaction could go from "neat but I have no idea where to start or how to filter what is good here" to "Finally a place where I can learn how good rails people do various things and why they're done that way."

Great ideas.. thanks a lot. I thought about this sort of thing, but for now only had enough time to implement a "blog post" link on each scaffold page, allowing the author to link to more info on their blog about what the scaffold does, or how it works.

Granted my above idea would sort of overlap you with railscasts or asciicasts, however the one issue is that thoses casts go out of date. If your site or another site focused on idioms only, and the best practice to use those idioms, peer-reviewed with comments and maybe versioning, then it would easily become a go-to reference for developers, that would always contain the most up-to-date method of implementing said idiom.

For instance, you want to implement authentication. Right now the best thing you can do is head to railscasts, see what the latest screencast is for authenticaiton. Ah, november 2010. Might as well be ancient history! Perhaps there's a newer, easier, more-accepted authentication gem out there. Or maybe not! You just don't know. So what's next, maybe check some blogs, github, do some date-specific searches on google, etc.

If you or someone else had a site that basically said, "here's the current accepted practice for implementing authentication, and here's why", then that saves so much time!

Yea - there’s a lot of overlap with different things. Ryan’s screencasts on one hand, which are amazing even when out of date, and things like http://ruby-toolbox.com/, which give you a list of gems to look at/choose from on the other. Plus github itself is the best place to find actual code, and is peer reviewed in the sense of watch counts, etc...

All I can hope for is that with some community involvement, ScaffoldHub might become something useful in the middle: not in depth tutorials, not a code repository, but a series of helpful working examples.

I certainly can’t do it alone!

Also from a security perspective, I'd like to see the code that I'm transferring to my machine (and likely executing).

Yes - this is an important concern, I agree. I hope that ratings/comments/reputation for scaffolds can help here. It's actually no different than installing a gem: you rely on the reputation of the gem author or else recommendations from other users to trust the gem will not do any harm when you try to use it.

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