Gnomefiles Gets Pretty URLs

So Eugenia IM’ed me and told me that GNOME was pretty insistent about the fact that they wanted to see Gnomefiles clean up the URLs to make them more friendly. She asked me how hard the move would be. Having already dug pretty deep into GF code, I knew that it wouldn’t take too much effort to clean things up. So, just a few days later, I’m pretty sure we’ve gotten all the bugs ironed out. Apps are now accessed like this: http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/[appname] where [appname] is, obviously, the name of the application.

There were a few challenges. For one, the plus character has significance in the URL, so apps like, say, GTK+, are inaccessible. So now we dynamically convert those titles to something like GTK_Plus. Also, spaces are switched to underscores. The one thing that burned me was that some apps have names that include strings like Sunbird/Calendar, which is not only URL significant, but it also breaks the code. So unfortunately, we have convert those to pipes right now, so an app such as the previously mentioned Mozilla Sunbird/Calendar is now available at http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/Mozilla_Sunbird|Calendar. Until I have a better way to pull this off, / becomes a pipe.

However, for nearly all other apps, you’ve now got a very pretty URL. Fear not, your old URLs still work, but you’ll probably want to update your incoming links to point to the new style URL.