[cgiapp] C::A::P::Routes

[Michael Peters]

On 03/04/2010 10:04 AM, Brad Van Sickle wrote:

> Maybe CGI::Application::Dispatch or CAP::Routes is a better/more
> powerful way to do this... but I don't see how.  Which is why I'm asking.

There are pros and cons to both ways (using mod_rewrite or Dispatch) and 
I frequently use them both, even in the same project.

The main reasons I like (and wrote) Dispatch is because I wanted pretty 
URLs with more meaning (REST-ish). This makes things slightly more sane. 
But by doing it all in the proxy with mod_rewrite means that you need to 
change your httpd.conf every time you change your application. If these 
rules are in a proxy then it's definitely a violation of concerns when 
your proxy server needs to be intimately familiar with your applications 
URL structure. It also makes it harder to move the application around to 
a different server setup or different proxy software.

And using Dispatch makes certain things way easier than mod_rewrite. Off 
the top of my head:

+ Dispatching based on HTTP request type (GET vs POST)
+ Dispatching based on
+ Easier to understand and write. Compare

     '/app/:rm/:year/:month/:day'
   vs
     RewriteRule /app/([^/]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)
      http://server/app.pl?rm=$1&year=$2&month=$3&day=$4 [P,L]

   Now try to imagine how much crazier that regular expression needs to 
be if you wanted to do something like this:

   '/app/:rm/:year?/:month?/:day?'

+ Easy to pass different parameters to your application's new() method.
   Imagine for example a situation where you have a single application
   (same code) but you need to customize that application depending on
   the URL that was accessed. Maybe it's a beta version, or a different
   client, etc.

-- 
Michael Peters
Plus Three, LP