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Differences with Routes

Author: Martin Blais <blais@furius.ca>
Date: 2006-04-21

Abstract

A short email sent to the Routes/Pylons list to announce Ranvier and stimulate discussion about its differences with Routes. If you're wondering how Ranvier differs from existing systems, this is perhaps a good summary.

I've had a few ideas over the weekend about a routing system for URL mapping for my application, that shares a lot of similarities with the Routes system. I implemented it, wrote some tests, and converted my web application code to use it and I'm thorougly happy with it and will release it soon. I thought some of the Pyloners might be interested in having a look, because it is very similar to Routes and there may be some synergy opportunities/ideas that we may feed each other's projects on. Here are the key differences (I won't list the similarities, there are many):

Anyway, if anyone is interested, here is the link: http://furius.ca/ranvier/

There is a simple running demo here: http://furius.ca/ranvier/demo/

In particular: http://furius.ca/ranvier/demo/resources http://furius.ca/ranvier/demo/prettyres

Ranvier's documentation: http://furius.ca/ranvier/doc/ranvier-doc.html

For now this is just a one-man project but if some people would like to contribute new stuff to it I'm very open to patches. I'll release this as soon as I find time to complete the documentation nicely. If you see opportunities for merging some of the stuff let me know. In particular, I think it would be possible to build an interface for Ranvier that is similar to the connect() interface of Routes, creating a tree of resources dynamically, but I'm not sure of some of the issues if I did that (and I don't need it now, so I won't indulge).

Anyway, I would be interested in comments or criticisms about it, whether you think it has disadvantages, advantages, etc. Any comments and discussion welcome.