last modified 2011-07-15 14:14

While hacking on a large system at work, months ago, I spent about a day looking at every URI router or request dispatcher on the CPAN. That day, I was feeling really unhappy with all of them. They all seemed just fine, if you were starting from scratch and had no particular vested interest in how your router worked. For me, though, none of them quite cut it. I decided it wasn't worth trying to change the design for the rest of the application. I would just write a new, bespoke router.

This week, again, I needed to put some routing between the HTTP request and the templates. I looked over the routers on CPAN again. Path::Router came closest, to what I needed, but it was missing a few features. Its maintainers were (cautiously) welcoming to patches, but it quickly became clear to me that it would take longer for me to understand how to add what I wanted than it would take me to re-implement the features I wanted.

Am I nuts to write two routers in under six months, when there are at least a dozen already on the CPAN? I don't think so. Right now, it seems like routers are just something that it's easy to re-do each time. Different applications call for different routing mechanisms, and building one is an afternoon's work. If I don't build a few more routers over the next few years, I'll be pretty surprised.

As for the router I just made, I think it's actually pretty decent, but hardly something I'm going to advocate that everyone else go use. Its implementation was inspired by my desire to keep using Mason for templates. I really like Mason, at least as a templating system. I like the way its templates can be broken down and can easily use each other. I like the way that many parts of it can be replaced as components. I haven't seen another system that I like as much. None of this is to say, though, that Mason is without its own massive glaring problems.

One of them is that once you remove it from the context of Apache or a similar full-featured HTTP daemon, you realize how many features it's missing. For example, there's no way to trivially tell Mason which templates are okay to serve to HTTP requests and which are only for internal use. There's no magic filename like index.html , unless you want to use a dhandler -- and then you'd have two problems. What I really wanted was a router that would sit between Mason and the web request, doing just that one job that Apache used to do. I wanted it to auto-populate a list of templates that were known to be directly reachable by the user, but I wanted to be able to add routes with placeholders, too. I wanted to be able to simulate Mason's dhandler.

For all this, I only needed a few simple kinds of routes:

/about/careers # simple, static path /user/:uid/profile # a path with named placeholders /posts/:list/query/* # a path with a slurpy star -- "the rest of the URI"

These are all easy to route, and cover all of Mason's standard routing and more. The placeholders could be typed. The slurpy star works for dhandlers. A few existing routers handled this, but not all with this exact set of features, or with the ability to easily add routes after construction, and so on.

I ended up with a router like this:

my $router = Router::Dumb->new; $router->add_route( Router::Dumb::Route->new({ parts => [ qw(about careers) ], target => 'endpoints/about/careers', }); $router->add_route( Router::Dumb::Route->new({ parts => [ qw(user :uid profile) ], target => 'view/user/profile', }); $router->add_route( Router::Dumb::Route->new({ parts => [ qw(posts :list query *) ], target => 'view/list/query', });

This is boring to type, but that's okay, because I knew I wouldn't have to. I was going to organize Mason's comp_root like this:

./comp_root ./comp_root/endpoints/INDEX ./comp_root/endpoints/about/INDEX ./comp_root/endpoints/about/careers ./comp_root/view/user/profile ./comp_root/view/list/profile ./comp_root/widget/userbox

Anything in endpoints was automatically routable. The INDEX files would handle requests for their containing directory -- otherwise, directories would not be routable. Templates outside of the endpoints directory would only be reachable by explicit routes (like routes to the view templates), or from within existing templates (like common widgets in the widget directory).

I wrote a helper class that would take a router and a directory and map files inside it to routes. That covered the endpoints directory. Next up, I needed to map to the view templates, so I made another helper that would read routes from a simple (read: dumb) text file that looks like this:

/user/:uid/profile => /view/user/profile uid isa Int /posts/:list/query/* => /view/list/query

This would set up the routes to the target, and add type constraints if requested. It's a dumb file format, but I can replace it whenever, because it's not part of the router. It's just a file for a tiny helper that converts the file's contents into the lower-level work of calling the router's add_route method.

This had another nice benefit: with our Catalyst applications, our web designer would often add a page to the site, only to find that it wasn't reachable. We needed an action for it. We had a few hacks to work around this, but they were grotty and unsatisfactory. Now, he can either put it in the endpoint directory or edit an extremely simple and straightforward text file to make the new page immediately available -- no need to screw around with the controller classes.

All told, this took a couple hours of work. I put the source for Router-Dumb on GitHub, but I'm not sure there's a reason to publish it to the CPAN: if your router needs aren't exactly mine, maybe you'll be happy with the other dozen routers already up there.