This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Jeremy Voorhis. Original Post: Urlang Feed Title: JVoorhis Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jvoorhis Feed Description: JVoorhis is a Rubyist in northeast Ohio. He rambles about Ruby on Rails, development practices, other frameworks such as Django, and on other days he is just full of snark. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Jeremy Voorhis Latest Posts From JVoorhis

Some weeks ago, after discovering Rack, I took it upon myself to experiment with my own anti-framework in Ruby, using existing libraries whenever possible and filling in the blanks as I go. A vital piece of most web frameworks is the dispatcher – the module that delegates web requests to application code.

irb(main):002:0> UrlParser.parse("/foo/1,2,3/meep=fleem;fliffl=mumble,grumble/")
=> [["foo"], ["1", "2", "3"], {"meep"=>["fleem"], "fliffl"=>["mumble", "grumble"]}]

The simple language uses a slash to separate values, a comma to group them into a list, and equals and semi-colon together to create a hash. The values are returned as a list.

register(:module => PostsController, :action => :show,
         :path => ['posts', Integer], :method => GET)

Further refinements to the path language might include recognizing ints and floats, and distinguishing between array and scalar values.

If you find the idea interesting, or even terrible, I’d love to hear your thoughts on both the path language and the dispatching semantics.

p.s. No, I’m not actually calling this “Urlang”.