Chapter 3. The Routing System

The Two Faces of Routing

The routing system does two things: It recognizes URLs and it generates URLs.

Recognizing URLs is useful because it’s how your application decides what it’s supposed to do when a particular request comes in:

http://localhost:3000/recipes_for/apples    What do we do now?!

Generating URLs is useful because it allows you to use relatively high-level syntax in your view templates and controllers when you need to insert a URL—so you don’t have to do this:

<a href="http://localhost:3000/recipes_for/apples">Apple recipes</a>
Not much fun having to type this out ...

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