This is a breaking API change that changes how wildcard patterns are
treated. In particular, wildcards are no longer allowed to appear at
arbitrary places in the URL, and are only allowed to appear immediately
after a path separator. This change effectively changes the wildcard
sigil from "*" to "/*".
Users who use wildcard routes like "/hello*" will have to switch to
regular expression based routes to preserve the old semantics.
The motivation for this change is that it allows the router to publish a
special "tail" key which represents the unmatched portion of the URL.
This is placed into URLParams under the key "*", and includes a leading
"/" to make it easier to write sub-routers.
This feature can be used in place of the pile of hacks in middleware.go,
and doesn't involve awkwardly shimming out a http.ResponseWriter. Sounds
like a win-win!
The "name" parameter was originally a workaround for the fact that function
pointers in Go never compare equal to each other (unless they are both nil).
Unfortunately, this presents a pretty terrible interface to the end programmer,
since they'll probably end up stuttering something like:
mux.Use("MyMiddleware", MyMiddleware)
Luckily, I found a workaround for doing function pointer equality (it doesn't
even require "unsafe"!), so we can get rid of the name parameter for good.
This change replaces a bit of API surface area (the Sub() method on Muxes) with
a slightly more expressive pattern syntax. I'm mostly doing this because it
seems cleaner: the "*" gets to take on a meaning very similar to what it means
in Sinatra (without growing regexp-like middle-of-a-path globbing, which sounds
terrifying and not particularly useful), and we get to nuke a useless function
from the API.
Carl Jackson
Coda Hale