[I'm reposting this message from a while back, because the new release 1.92.1 contains it for the first time. It describes some simple use cases for the new URL router. Note that there are still some things that you'll need the existing regex-based router for, but for most cases the new one should work and be easier to configure.]
Suppose you've written an app, named it 'myapp', and want to make it the default, with its name always removed. Your default controller is still 'default', and you want to remove its name from user-visible URLs as well. Here's what you put in routes.py: routers = dict( BASE = dict( default_application='myapp' ), ) That's it. And it's smart enough to know how to do the right thing with URLs like: http://domain.com/myapp/default/myapp or http://domain.com/myapp/myapp/index ...where normal shortening would be ambiguous. If you have two applications, myapp and myapp2, you'll get the same effect, and additionally myapp2's default controller will be stripped from the URL whenever it's safe (which is mostly all the time). Another case. Suppose you want to support URL-based languages, where your URLs look like this: http://myapp/en/some/path or (rewritten) http://en/some/path Here's how: routers = dict( BASE = dict( default_application='myapp' ), myapp = dict( languages=['en', 'it', 'jp'], default_language='en' ), ) Now an incoming URL like this: http:/domain.com/it/some/path will be routed to /myapp/some/path, and request.uri_language will be set to 'it', so you can force the translation. You can also have language-specific static files. http://domain.com/it/static/filename will be mapped to: applications/myapp/static/it/filename ...if that file exists. If it doesn't, then URLs like: http://domain.com/it/static/base.css ...will still map to: applications/myapp/static/base.css (because there is no static/it/base.css) So you can now have language-specific static files, including images, if you need to. Domain mapping is supported as well. routers = dict( BASE = dict( domains = { 'domain1.com' : 'app1', 'domain2.com' : 'app2', } ), ) does what you'd expect. routers = dict( BASE = dict( domains = { 'domain.com:80' : 'app/insecure', 'domain.com:443' : 'app/secure', } ), ) ...maps http://domain.com accesses to app's controller named 'insecure', while https accesses go to the 'secure' controller. Or you can map different ports to different apps, in the obvious way. There's more, but mostly everything happens automatically, and there's no need to dig into the details of configuration unless there's some non-standard thing you need. There's a bit more documentation in router.example.py.