Paul M. Jones

I am proud to announce that I have released AutoRoute 2.0.0, now for PHP 8. As an alternative to regex and annotation-based routers, AutoRoute eliminates the need for route definitions by automatically mapping the HTTP action class hierarchy to the HTTP method verb and URL path, reflecting on typehinted action method parameters to determine the dynamic portions of the URL. It presumes that the action class names conform to a well-defined convention, and that the action method parameters indicate the dynamic portions of the URL. This makes the implementation both flexible and relatively maintenance-free.

Of special importance, you can now use value objects as action parameters, and AutoRoute will automatically instantiate them for you. This means things like self-validating value objects, including DDD Identity value objects, are now trivial to work with in your action classes.

For example, whereas you might have done something like this previously ...

// GET /company/1
class GetCompany
{
    public function __invoke(int $id)
    {
        $companyId = new CompanyId($id);
        $company = $this->serviceLayer->fetchCompany($companyId);
        // ...
    }
}

... AutoRoute can now instantiate the CompanyId for you from the appropriate path segment:

// GET /company/1
class GetCompany
{
    public function __invoke(CompanyId $companyId)
    {
        $company = $this->serviceLayer->fetchCompany($companyId);
        // ...
    }
}

AutoRoute 2.0.0 is still faster than FastRoute, though not by as much as the 1.x series; it has dropped from about three times as fast to about two times as fast. (This is due to some internal rework to support value objects as action arguments.) Even so, remember that routing is only one small part of your HTTP user interface, and is unlikely to be a bottleneck in any case.