Chapter 5
The Depot Application

We could mess around all day hacking together simple test applications, but that won’t help us pay the bills. So, let’s sink our teeth into something meatier. Let’s create a web-based shopping cart application called Depot.

Does the world need another shopping cart application? Nope, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds of developers from writing one. Why should we be different?

More seriously, it turns out that our shopping cart will illustrate many of the features of Rails development. You’ll see how to create maintenance pages, link database tables, handle sessions, create forms, and wrangle modern JavaScript. Over the next twelve chapters, we’ll also touch on peripheral topics such as unit and system testing, security, and page layout.