Announcing Router Specifically

Introducing accu-router

I recently built a webapp from the “ground up” using nothing but Bootstrap. I used a few utilities from previous projects, like perfget, new standards like es6-promises, and a few gists I needed to prove out.

After shipping the demo app, I looked for other examples of routers. Working without a framework means you need your own router but I wasn’t totally happy with my implementation. I took inspiration from routes which returns an object instead of invoking the handler. I feel like that’s a great touch and works with my new, “less opinionated” philosophy.

However, when I looked at the implementation, routes, like many other routers, naively iterates over the universe of routes to find a match. I decided that my router would use specificity to match routes and store them as Object keys for faster access. I came up with an algorithm that turns a route like 'a/b/c' into a series of predictable paths, each gradually less specific, until a match is found or the final route '*' fails to match. This means you get a fast match based purely on distance to a viable match with no penalties for late registration or having thousands of registered routes.

Just like routes, params use the /:<name> pattern and wildcards use /*. Internally, I convert those to _ or * where the underscore is more specific than the wildcard.

That series looks like this:

• a/b/c
• -> a/b/_ ( _ represents a param like /:id )
• -> a/b/*
• -> a/_/_
• -> a/_/*
• -> a/*
• -> _/_/_
• -> _/_/*
• -> _/*
• -> *

Take it for a spin. Feel free to comment here or in the github issues.