Rails Scaffold

DHH had a profound realization. There's a lot of permutational information in relational table definitions than anyone uses. GUIs depend mainly on permutational information. So why not get it straight from the database?

This permits web app code generation that solves a lot of simple GUI needs straight out of the box. The code's rigid boilerplate, not something to maintain ... but if you want to change it you can write your own controllers and move on without worrying that there's a bunch of things that are going to be a pain for you to get at except with some proprietary database client.

The result is called a RailsScaffold, an easily abused part of RubyOnRails.