Matt,

Per your instructions, here is the sample application. I won't have any time to work on this tomorrow, and so this will have to be my submission. 

Most of the functionality (call the API, validate the output, parse the output into URLs) is in the searches_helper.rb class. Had this been a Java app, I probably would have encapsulated these behaviors into a model class. I don't know if putting these behaviors into the helper class is the "Rails" way to do things. 

I used the "text" method rather than the "tags" method of searching for photos. Trial and error showed that this gave a better result. I used the license types, rather than the "IsCommons" tag for the same reason. 

There is a set of tests for the model and for the helper class. I ran out of time to write tests for the controller. Since the application is so simple (two pages), I took out a lot of the default routing that was built by the scaffolding. The only actions this application recognizes are new and result (which is a custom action I added.)

I used the out of the box sqlite3 database and WEBrick for the server. 

The source is at https://github.com/BaronVonReed/Doug-Reed-Sample-App 

Let me know if you have any issues getting to the github repository, and I hope to talk to you soon. Thanks for giving me a chance to do this. I had a lot of fun getting my hands dirty in Rails. 

Doug