There are many times when I need to put together an idea really quickly and lately I have been trying to use Ruby on Rails more,  in the past couple of months I’ve been trying to make that more of a thing.

Lately I needed to mock up a few screens for basic data entry and I decided to put something together using rails.  It was an easy start with a few migrations (Rails 2.0 style) to get a schema in place - then I considered a UI.  Originally I thought about scaffold, but I was never a big fan of generating lots of code that I would probably leave lying around.  I wanted something that would give me a shell of functionality (in this case to allow some basic CRUD operations) but not litter the application with code that I would probably want to remove later.  Enter ActiveScaffold.

It only took a couple of hours to get a  a five controllers in place to allow me to manage most of the data,  was it bullet-proof ? err.. no - but then again it was functional and step in the right direction.  Take a look at the demos,  they are worth a look, and when you get a chance have a look throwing it in to see what it can do