On the ServerGrove blog today Raul Fraile has posted another in their spotlights on individual components of the Symfony2 framework. This time the focus is on Routing, the component that, true to its name, handles the translation from HTTP request to the code path to handle it.

This is the third post of the Symfony2 components series, and this time we are going to cover the Routing component, which maps an HTTP request to a set of configuration variables, which can then be used to execute code using PHP callables. The component simplifies the task of defining friendly URLs, without having to worry about complex and cryptic .htaccess files – hurray!.

He talks about the four main parts of the component - the RouteCollection, RequestContext, UrlMatcher and UrlGenerator - and gives a simple example of their use outside of the full framework context. These include normal paths, ones with parameters and constraints. There's also a bit about performance and its use of "matcher dumpers" to compile down and decrease the overall processing time per request.