Everyone gets a meaningful URL

One of the things that I don't necessarily enjoy is messed up URL's. Don't get me wrong, I've done my part in creating some apps that create unreadable url's, but that doesn't mean that I liked it.

One of the issues we've had a work is part of CLF 2.0 (because it's a 2.0 world) where they talk about url's and how they should give equal treatment to both official languages when naming folders and files. Now, having people talented at development and translation and have those translations jive with what the client feels is correct can be almost impossible. So having url's that are contained within an app is just a recipe for tons of QA and redeploys as discussions over the proper word happens.

Using annotations and spring's @RequestMapping value attribute you can tie a controller or method of a controller to multiple url mappings. e.g. you can have your method run if someone hits home.html or maison.html The issue with this solution is 1) that your mapping is still within your code 2) you can't easily add support for another language.

Aside: stay with me on this one, I haven't worked through the issues like security. Andrew and I only came up with this last thing today.

Normally if you're using the @RequestMapping annotation you need to have the DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping bean configured. This is what connects the url's coming into the app with the annotations configured. On start up it "registers" all the annotations. What you can do is have an external data store (property files, db, it doesn't matter) that will contain all the accepted urls for what's contained in the annotation.

Example:

public class MultilingualAnnotationHandlerMapping extends DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping {

// TODO inject into bean
private String suffix = ".html";

// TODO inject as well, for both possibily have them as a Collection
private String prefix = "/";

@Override
protected void addUrlsForPath(Set<String> urls, String path) {

// this map you get from another service / file etc.  Either cache it on this bean or somewhere else.
Map<String, Collection<String>> urlMapping = // ...

// the path is the thing that's found in the annotation
if (urlMapping.containsKey(path)) {
Collection<String> languageUrls = urlMapping.get(path);

// register each url
for (String url : languageUrls) {
super.addUrlsForPath(urls, buildKey(url));
}
}

// make sure we also add the original path as well
super.addUrlsForPath(urls, path);
}

private String buildKey(String path) {
return prefix + path + suffix;
}
}

Now in your controller class, you can just put in a something like @RequestMapping("my.admin.controller.key") and have the urlMapping object above populated with a list of all the different translations for that key. eg. You can have key "my.admin.controller.key" point to [home, maison, casa], etc. You can even leave it to the original home.html as your key and just add mappings for the other languages.

This solution only helps solve the different translations coming in, it would still be required to have a tag lib or EL function or something that would put the correct name into your jsp or whatever. But having done this you can have the app provide meaningful urls to all the users, rather than a subset or none.

I'm actually hopeful that this solution would work well. ;-)