Routing: Mapping URLs

Purpose of routing

Another important concept that needs to be discussed before we move on to the next chapter is routing. We will be discussing it because of the following two concerns:

1. We have .php in every page URL, which does not look great. A URL that looks like /pictures instead of /pictures.php needs to be used.
2. The URL of a page is tied to its file name, which does not give us flexibility. A URL that looks like /random-number, which shows the output of the random.php script, needs to be used. We also want to be able to rename that file, while the URL stays the same and vice versa ( we should be able to change the URL without changing the name of the script).

Once all of this is possible, we can move the page scripts out of public/ because they no longer need to be publicly accessible. Instead, we will have one entry point for the PHP server, the index.php file, which will inspect the URL of a request and include the right PHP script.