URL Rewriter

Since writing yesterday’s post about what annoys me regarding the limited insight most web developers have in regards to Routing vs Rewriting. It occurred to me that I might be able to make the difference and benefits between the two more clear, after remembering a post Phil Haack wrote about Editable MVC Routes. By taking my companies already production ready URL Rewriter that supports runtime-editing of rewriter rules and adding support for routes. I would essentially be merging together Routing and Rewriting in the same configuration, and making the routes just as editable as the rewriter rules. By doing this, my hope is that it should illustrate the benefits of having both a Rewriter as well as a Router in your web arsenal, because you can play with both in real time and start to connect in your mind when one is more useful than the other. ...

As most of you are probably aware, if you read my blog enough, I am the sole developer of a URL Rewriter that I have tried to keep extensible and relevant to the problems that modern web developers face when exposing their applications to the web, by allowing them to have more control over the only interface that matters on the web … THE URL. The benefits of a URL Rewriter have been explained many times, by many people, so I am not going to add just another rant to the web about keeping your URL’s clean for the search engines. I will just leave you with Jeff’s explanation of why you shouldn’t ignore the URL. ...

I just wanted to share a really well written article on how to setup a Reverse Proxy, by John Gully, using the Url Rewriter that I have been working on for the past 2 years. Here is an excerpt from his article. I recently came to realize that our website situation was growing out of hand. We had a corporate website, an intranet site, and even a site for web access to email. All of these sites were scattered across multiple servers and each was on a unique port. While this worked, it was not simple. Each new site had to have a new rule configured in the firewall, and who wants the hassle of putting port number at the end of a url? The solution to this mess turned out to be adding a reverse proxy to our network. By simply providing different urls (www.example.com, mail.example.com) the incomming traffic can be anlayzed by the proxy server and routed to the appropriate internal web server. All the incomming traffic is sent over the default port 80 so the end user never sees any difference. That’s exactly what I wanted, great! Since our sites are all built upon ASP.NET and hosted on IIS6 the natural option for this was Microsoft ISA Server. Unfortunately, the $1500 cost was way beyond our small company’s internal IT budget. So it was off to Google for me, and after some searching, it appeared that the open source project Url Rewriter by ManagedFusion [sic] seemed to fit the bill. ...

I am happy to announce the 3.0 release of the Managed Fusion URL Rewriter & Reverse Proxy. Since my previous release in February I have been working hard on a significant rewrite of the core, that to be honest really needed refactoring if I hoped to extend the rewriter is some interesting ways in the future. Download: Binary Release View: Source Code Discuss: Forum Issues: Report Release Notes If you would like to find out more about the past releases please visit us at http://www.managedfusion.com/products/url-rewriter/release-notes.aspx ...

I am really blown back about how fast and easy MVC is to develop with. I know the guys at Microsoft do a good job with their .NET coding, but I am really impressed by the forethought they put in to MVC. It builds on top of the standard ASP.NET package, but does it in such a way that makes it lean on top of the already feature-rich (read bloated) ASP.NET Page object. It really doesn’t feel like I have all that baggage anymore. ...