Monday, 2 April 2007

Article: Learn About URL Routing with PHP

Doug Hill in the first part of the series on URL routing with PHP explores a simple procedural URL routing method that contains many of the disadvantages. He says to note that the requirements will be PHP and Apache with mod_rewrite enabled.

He discusses the article under the following heads:

Redirecting with mod_rewrite

He says this article doesn’t discuss mod_rewrite and the .htaccess in detail, the .htaccess file is sufficient for the needs of the simple front controller. He says that the .htaccess file should be placed in the same directory as the front controller script. All requests will be sent to index.php while requests for a file or directory that does exist will bypass the mod_rewrite rules and be served directly by the web server.

The Entry Point

He chose a simple format for the incoming URL, a command followed by its parameters separated by forward slashes ‘/’. He gives examples to make his point clearer.

Dispatching the Command

He says that having a command with its parameters stored in an array it is trivial to handle them via a switch statement. He gives a short example to explain the pointer.