== Welcome to the "Shopping demo"

This is a demonstration application for the Smartguard permissioning
plugin.  See the slide presentation at

 http://dev.smartleaf.com/permissioning/brg2007_slides/perm_present.html

for an overview, and the rdoc for details.  The code is current
with Rails 2.0.2, and should work on edge.  The demo controllers
require two plugins from Argument From Design (though the core
permissioning code does not), so to make it operate:

 $ script/plugin install http://svn.ardes.com/rails_plugins/resources_controller/
 $ script/plugin install http://svn.ardes.com/rails_plugins/inherit_views/

Also, after instantiating the schema as usual with

 $ rake db:migrate

you'll need to create the initial user and roles with

 $ ruby script/bootstrap_perms

Take note of the password of the initial user as reported by
the script; you'll need it to log in.  (I'm doing things this
way to avoid creating a well-known user/password combination,
a la "scott/tiger" on more than half the Oracle installations
on the planet).  

The core permissioning code mostly resides in the 'lib' directory.
However, certain models, particularly Role, User, RoleAssignment,
and (of course) Permission also contain core functionality; these
are in the app/models directory, as usual, and model layer tests
reside in test/unit.  (Also included is a small plugin that 
provides support for foreign key constraints, based in part on
earlier work by bubbleware.com and atmos.org).

These files are, right now, embedded in a demo application which
presents a rather elaborate "shopping" scenario, in which the
following objects exist and have various access rights:

  * Products --- items that may be offered for sale
  * Stores --- storefronts that offer Products for sale to the public
  * Offers --- a record that a particular store has a given product
    on sale, perhaps at a discount.
  * Firms --- companies that might have Products or Stores,
    and which also have user affiliations. 
  * Orders and LineItems --- the obvious components of customer
    shopping carts.

(As to what this might actually _be_ in real life, consider, say,
booksite.com, which actually does offer a common back end for
multiple independent bookshops, and could conceivably also offer
publishers the right to maintain their lists on the system; both
publishers and store owners would be firms, with disparate sets
of access rights.  In fact, publishing for real is probably
_more_ complicated, due to the involvement of large-scale
distributors like Ingram... but I digress).

This version of the code has been tested on Postgres and 
should also work on Mysql.