Hello dear esteemed monks,

My toy framework called MVC::Neaf has crawled to 0.20 milestone. EDIT And it's got some misleading method names in it which I would like to correct.

One thing I'm struggling to grasp is how to call requested path's fragments - the part that matched the current controller and whatever follows that path. The current convention is as follows:

• script_name is the part of the path that matched current route, not the name of the script or the raw stuff from PSGI request.
• path_info is anything that follows that matching part, for instance a wiki article name.
• path_info_split is a newer version that takes regular expression capture groups into account.

The overall /EDIT syntax, though still evolving, looks like follows now:

use strict;
use warnings;
use MVC::Neaf qw(:sugar);

get + post '/some/path' => sub {
    my $req = shift;

    my $foo = $req->param( foo );
    my $bar = $req->param( bar => '\w+' ) # no params w/o validation
        or die 404; # render a "not found" page
    my ($from, $to) = $req->path_info_split;

    $req->script_name; # '/some/path'

    # frobnicate
    my $data = frobnicate( $bar, $from .. $to );

    return {
        result => $data,
        foo    => $foo,
    };
}, default => {
    -view     => 'TT', # JS is the default which generates JSON
    -template => 'some_file.tt',
     title    => 'My mega new application',
     version  => '0.42',
}, param_regex => { foo => '\d+' }, path_info_regex => '(\d+)/(\d+)';

# Hitting /some/path would trigger roughly something like follows
# (assuming the controller doesn't die/redirect/stop otherwise)
# $my_template->process( 'some_file.tt', {
#     title => ..., 
#     version => ..., 
#     result => ...,
#     # whatever else controller returned  
# } );

neaf->run;
[download]

Some working examples exist in the distro.

I know everyone else is using routes of form '/foo/:bar' these days but I don't really like it (although support may be added in the end). The reason is there are a number of formats (:foo, *bar, #baz) and they still don't cover all needed cases ([0-9]+ being the most obvious one).

Now I feel like like these SCRIPT_NAME and PATH_INFO dating back into past century are awkward. My proposal is to rename this stuff completely:

• $req->route() stands for the route that matched (Dancer does like that already).
• $req->suffix() returns the URI capture groups if any were defined.
• suffix => qr/(...)and(...)/ is the corresponding route parameter.
• get '/article/(\d+)/(\d\d)/(\d\d)/(.*)' => ... - I'm also thinking about adding capture groups right into the path (w/o suffix parameter) but that'd be hard to undo so I'm holding it back.
• param => \%spec is the predefined regular expression hash for $req->param( "name" ); (Neaf explicitly forbids unvalidated params and cookies, much like perl -T does).

This scheme looks consistent and clear to me, but maybe I'm missing something. Does that look like a syntax you'd like to try out? What would you like to be added/removed? What is causing surprise and awkwardness here?

Thank you,

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