I’m trying to comprehend the concept behind MVC and URL routing. I understand that it’s good to seperate your code, hence MVC, but fail to understand the idea behind the URL router!
Instead of having a lot of rewrite rules in htaccess, I send all traffic to router.php, and in this page I have an array with page urls, and its corresponding PHP controller.
To keep it simple, I just include the controller, where the output finally is generated, however having seen lots of other practices, I’m afraid that im doing something wrong, or bad in some way..
Can someone please enlighten me, how to do a good, but simple URL router? Is it okay just to include the controller, which then generates the output? Perhaps someone has some information that describes the subject in details (something understandable for a beginner)
Thanks in advance
There are lots of ways to do URL routing. Some are client side like with backbone.js, others are server side. Doing it with .htaccess is one way, another is th way you are doing it by having a prerequisite path that is is either a hard path, or a regular expression that you parse and figure out where to send it. None of them are 100% right or 100% wrong, it’s all preference, and it sounds like you are doing just fine with a route file.
For more information on how different frameworks do routing you should read over the docs on routing for CodeIgniter, and Symfony frameworks to see 2 different styles of server side routing, and then maybe look at the backbone.js framework for client side routing just to see the similarities and differences.