routes with Cherrypy

As I posted earlier, my new favorite web framework is cherrypy. I love its simplicity and the fact that I'm not wrestling with magic to do exactly what I want to do. One bug knock against cherry py is its routing mechansim. By default it uses an object reference routing, so take the following:


class HelloWorld()
def index(self):
return "

Welcome

"

def say_hello(self):
return "

Hello World!

"

class Root(object):

hello = HelloWorld()

app = cherrypy.tree.mount(Root(), config=conf)
cherrypy.quickstart(app)

Notice that our Root object creates a controller as a member var called hello. By default the way we would have a browser call the "say hello" method is by:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/hello/say_hello

This is fine and simple, but as we all know in the world of search engine optimization you have to put as much into your urls as you do your content. This is why things like swimlanes and routes in frameworks such as rails and Servlets are so important. Not to fear becase you can do this in cherrypy also.

Cherrypy pretty much allows you to drop in any request dispatching mechanism you want. Thats the whole point of cherrypy is it completly stays out of your way so you can build the exact webapp you want. If you want to use the python routes package, go a ahead. If you want to write you own, more power to you.

Here is a tutorial on using routes with cherrypy.

Quickly, just by adding the following lines to the code where I start my cherrypy app:

 d = cherrypy.dispatch.RoutesDispatcher()
d.connect('blog', 'helloworld/, controller=Root.hello, action="say_hello")

And I now get routes style power!