The router is the backbone of your application. Trust me, that's how it is and I can prove it. One of the fundamental ideas in Web is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Or the way of how we very often call it - "web address". No mather what you are building there is a web address which identifies your resource. The router is the front office that accepts the request to particular URL and wires it to a logic. Logic for generating HTML or JSON response or something else. So, the router is very important part of your system.

At the end of last year I rewrote one of my favorite projects - a vanilla JS router called Navigo. I was procrastinating this work for years. Finally I did it in TypeScript and wrote 100+ unit tests along the way. This refactoring opens the door for new features and more importantly, for integrating the library into other places. Like React for example.

(This blog post is inspired by A modern JavaScript router in 100 lines and heavily related to Navigo router project)

If you build single page applications you probably know that one of the must-have parts is the router. The bit that knows how to tweak the content of the address bar and notifies the rest of the system for URL changes. In this article we will discuss the various aspects of the routing in the browser.

This is a quick post so I document my two hours research. I'm working on a open source library for routing in the browser. Or in other words JavaScript library that uses the history API. The thing is that locally I'm using Apache as a dev server and I wanted all the request to specific folder to be redirected to index.html.

(The router here is now placed in its own project - Navigo. There is also another article Deep dive into client-side routing which you may find interesting)

Nowadays the popular single page applications are everywhere. Having such application means that you need a solid routing mechanism. Frameworks like Emberjs are truly build on top of a Router class. I'm still not sure that this is a concept which I like, but I'm absolutely sure that AbsurdJS should have a build-in Router. And, as with everything in this little library, it should be small, simple class. Let's see how such a module may look like.