Section 7.4. Wrapping Up

7.4. Wrapping Up

Testing concludes our whirlwind tour through the Rails framework. We've barely scratched the surface. Photo Share is not nearly complete. We could have easily added:

• Security, with the Rails login generator or one of the other login products. With a security model, you can let each user manage and share her own set of photos, instead of having one community model.

• Uploading photos. You need to let the user upload photos with some other means, but Rails provides excellent support for simple tasks such as file uploads.

• Deployment. We've not even touched on pushing the Photo Share application into production, but good tools such as Capistrano (http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17) allow one-click deployment and also one-click reversal of changes.

• Comments and blogging. You can allow discussion about slides and slideshows. Simple support isn't difficult, but you can also build in the Typo blogging engine.

We've decided that these changes are beyond the scope of a quick-start book, but this list provides a sample of the community that's rapidly developing behind Rails. After this pass through Photo Share, you doubtlessly will be excited about doing more. In the appendixes that follow, we'll give you another whirlwind tour of what's available and how to find more information.

In Rails, an idea is rapidly crystallizing before our eyes as a real force in this industry, but this phenomenon is unlike anything you've ever seen before. So far, this explosion is happening within the open source community, without major commercial investment, and with an amazing amount of contribution from increasingly diverse contributors. The growth is fueled by a core of smart developers who understand that beautiful software can also be powerful, that useful development environments don't need to come from a corporation, and that real innovation doesn't always take the path you expect. We hope you've experienced a taste of what is to come. The rules are all changing. Welcome to the new game.

Only the YAML format allows you to name a fixture, so if you use the CSV format, you will not be able to do this.