Looking for creative ways to route URI to controllers

Question

I'm looking for new ways of dealing with the problem of finding the correct controller to deal with the resource the user is requesting.

Most frameworks simply parse the URI out into segments, check for any rewrite rules, and then finally load a controller with the same name.

example.com/user/update/4 -> Controller_User.update($id = 4);

What other ways are there to handle this resource-to-action problem? Are their any unique methods systems out there use?

Answer 1

In Django, you define a list of pairs, where each pair contains: a) a regular expression, and b) a controller that takes at most as many parameters as there are capturing groups in the expression. Each incoming URL is tested against each regular expression, in order. If the expression matches, then the controller is called and its parameters are filled by the capturing groups in the regex.

It's very powerful and very simple. On my homepage I have a Javascript implementation that takes around half a page of code.

Answer 2

You might be interested in traversal. This page details the Pyramid (formerly repoze.bfg) implementation of the traversal idea.