URL Routing

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. ...