What does scaffold mean in this context?

Question

A generator is basically a plugin that can be run with the yo command to >scaffold complete projects or useful parts.

It can be found under the "What's Yeoman?" section here: yeoman.io

Answer 1

Temporary architecture that lets you walk around your development while it is being built. In case of software, quick-and-dirty and often ready-made or generated classes that implement functionality you need while you work on other pieces.

For example, while building a blog, you might want to scaffold the data editor while working on making the blog itself presentable. The alternatives are to work on the data editor first while being blind on how the blog itself is going to look, or entering data manually into the database so your blog has something to display. Once you are done with the important bits, you can replace your scaffolding with "real" implementations (or not, if you're happy with autogenerated stuff).

Answer 2

Scaffolding let's you generate classes/models/views quickly from the command-line. For example, if you've got a database configured you might want to generate model classes for each table in your database.

IMO the Ruby on Rails documentation does a good job of explaining scaffolding:

A scaffold in Rails is a full set of model, database migration for that model, controller to manipulate it, views to view and manipulate the data, and a test suite for each of the above.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/v3.2.9/getting_started.html#getting-up-and-running-quickly-with-scaffolding