Days 9-11 at RC

My last update talked about how I was starting to look at routing on fnz. It’s been a little tougher than I expected! It’s not that hard to define routes, but I was having a lot of trouble figuring out how I could load my routes when a fnz application was initialized without it being too weird for a potential user. I circled this problem for a few days, played around with it, left it and played with other non-fnz things and finally decided to take a look at Destroy All Software to see how they handled routing in a screencast about building a framework. My goal with fnz was to reference Destroy All Software’s screencasts on the topic as little as possible, but I was feeling pretty stuck on it.

It turns out the one kind of key things I needed was the instance_eval method, which I had never used before. While it’s something I probably would be very careful about using in a traditional web app for fear of code injections from bad actors, it seemed like a good call in this case.

I was able to define an App which was initialized with a do block, the do block is then passed to instance_eval in the initialize method and my routes are created.

FNZ = Fnz.new do
  get './' do
    './public/index.html'
  end
end

get is a defined method on my Fnz class which creates a get route with an address and a block. In this case it would just return the file to be served, but we could do fancier things with it as well.

I was really happy to get unstuck on this problem. I think I will take a break from fnz for a few days before really wrapping up routing and continuing to new things.

Andrew Pierce

Software Engineer based in Durham, NC

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