Loïc Faugeron has posted the next part of his "Ultimate Developer Guide" series covering individual Symfony components. In this new article he details the routing component.

In this guide we explore the standalone libraries (also known as "Components") provided by Symfony to help us build applications. We've already seen: HTTP Kernel and HTTP Foundation [and the] Event Dispatcher. We're now about to check Routing and YAML.

He starts with a basic overview of the component and what kind of top-level handling it provides. He describes the UrlMatcherInterface and its role in the routing process and a simple collection of Route instances that implement it. Then he gets into the YAML component, providing a simple example defining the routes for your application. He shows how it's converted from the YAML structure into a PHP-based (array) output and is then dumped into a RouteCollection to define the resulting routes.