Floyd’s Thoughts…

Sometimes you need a catch-all route in rails to support dynamic applications like Content Management Systems, where all requests that are not matched by an existing route get passed to a controller who can deal with the request.

Add the following to the end of your routes.rb :

map.with_options(:controller => ‘page_engine’) do |site|
site.connect ‘*url’, :action => ‘show_page’
end

If that’s your last route, it means that anything that isn’t recognised by any of the other routes will get routed to that controller/action (page_engine/show_page). It shouldn’t interfere with images/assets because they are served with higher priority than Rails routes. It lets you have any number of forward-slashes.

So if you hit your site with the following URL:

http://localhost:3000/we/really/hate/wcf

The request will be routed to the show_page action in the page_engine controller where you can then access the actual url elements with :

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path = request.path # '/we/really/hate/wcf'
path_elements = request.path.split('/') # ['', 'we', 'really', 'hate', 'wcf']

While this isn’t the type of thing you would do on many Rails projects you certainly will find this useful for projects that have an element of dynamic routing that goes beyond the RESTful style that rails implements, and its especially useful for implementing Content Management Systems.

Last time I tried to do MemCache on windows I gave up, as getting MemCache to work on Windows was seriously difficult.

Well this is all a thing of the past due to some fine work from Kenneth Dalgleish who has created a Win32 port – Top Man

Installation

Download the memcache port from http://www.splinedancer.com/memcached-win32/

Extract the download to your filesystsm (say c:\memcached)

Create a service using the command : c:\memcached\memcached.exe -d install

Start the server using the command : c:\memcached\memcached.exe -d start (or using the services management console)

Thats it! by default it listens on port 11211

Rails 2.1 makes using memcache really easy and having this option on Windows is a real shot in the arm for Enterprises who are looking to host Rails apps on Windows.