Ruby on Rails has named routes with cool helpers that allow you to take advantage of them in your views, etc. By doing something as simple as map.resources :projects, for example, in your routes.rb file:
you can use these cool named routes in your views to simplify links, etc. in your Rails Applications. Shown below you can see something like new_project_path which is essentially a named route that is automatically generated by the simple map.resources :project mentioned above. As you might expect, there are others generated like projects_path, edit_project_path, etc. You can also get url's by replacing “path“ with “url“, like projects_url.
So what does this have to do with ASP.NET MVC?
Well, the ASP.NET 2.0 RoadMap discussed Strongly-Type Link Helpers to avoid magic strings to help with compile-time safety, refactoring, etc. The ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly already has strongly-typed helpers to avoid those magic strings today. However, the helpers use expressions that are rather ugly IMHO, a pain-in-the-butt to type, and apparently have performance issues according to Brad Wilson and reported by Phil Haack.
Interesting enough, David Ebbo has done a little of his code generation magic that he does so well, and came up with a prototype solution using build providers that looks better, but still doesn't seem as cool and intuitive as Rails.
In the end, I think it would be cool to get something similar to the self-documenting and intuitive style of named routes found in Rails, but gives us the compile-time safety and refactoring support. Not sure it is completely possible, but I like the idea of just typing something as simple as new_project_path in an action link helper to generate a link as opposed to the expression builders found in the ASP.NET MVC Futures Assembly.
I guess we'll see.
David Hayden
Ruby on Rails Posts