Routes

Routing is where all of Tessera’s power comes from. Routes basically define what URL patterns are mapped to which methods in your application class.

The Easy Route

<?php
require '../tessera.php';

class ArguableApp extends Tessera {
    function foo($bar) {
        echo "Bar is {$bar}, and that's that";
    }
}

$basic = new ArguableApp(array(
    '/foo/$bar' => 'foo'
));

For the rest of this writeup, assume that the code is saved as arguable.php on your domain, tesseratic.com.

In the ArguableApp application, only one route is defined. The route /foo/$bar is mapped to the ArguableApp::foo method. The $bar part of the route is a variable, meaning that any call to /foo/* will be matched, and the matched text will be passed as a parameter to the ArguableApp::foo method. For example, tesseratic.com/arguable.php?/foo/xyzzy will match, and $bar inside of ArguableApp::foo will equal "xyzzy".

The Route Less Traveled

Internally, routes are compiled to regular expressions, and parameter variables are compiled to (\w+), so keep that in mind when naming them. Routes can also be considerably more complex. If you add a new route to the application like this:

$basic = new ArguableApp(array(
    '/foo/$bar' => 'foo',
    '/bar/$baz/zip/$zap' => 'bar'
));

And the associated method:

function bar($baz, $zip) {
    echo "Now we're getting nutty with {$baz} and {$zip}.";
}

Requests to tesseratic.com/arguable.php?/bar/squirtle/zip/charmander will match, and $baz will equal "squirtle" and $zip will equal "charmander".

Why are routes so ugly?

While reading this, you probably noticed and wondered: “Why are all my routes in the query string? That’s terribly ugly.” That’s because I want the distribution to be server-agnostic. It would be trivial to add some rewrite rules to your server to hide away the php extensions and query string marker. In fact, it’s all on the deployment page.