ActiveScaffold is the lost art of administry. I found no other plugin to mach it in terms of features, instant gratification, configurability, code modularity etc. Volker made a titanic job porting to rails 3 (in production on my project), and now official branch is also pushing to rails 3. Only downside is a hard learning curve (ironically it does nothing special other than you usually code Rails apps, just injects methods in controllers and a few other nuts and bolts)

Also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546199

I find admin_assistant to be similar to AS but does not compare in terms of features/customizability. I wouldn't call them "generators" more like "code injectors", code that you can override (a natural thing in OOP).

Another big + for AS is the plethora of plugins/bridges (that also have the same philosophy of instant gratification):

https://github.com/vhochstein

https://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold/tree/master/li...

For example add CanCan to Gemfile, define abilities and BAM - user are restricted accordingly.

Shameless plug: CanCan bridge and a few others are contributed by yours truly.

Oh, and it's also highly documented (thanks Sergio & team) https://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold/wiki

Anyway, Puffer looks nice.