Here comes the problem, you’re prototyping a website that has powerful front-end like EmberJS or AngularJS, and sync JSON data with your NodeJS back-end, but you want your nodejs code to be lite and clean.

You can use some nodeJS framework like restify, expressJS, director or whatever, but is there a way to write a minimal router using regex and switch statements? Yes.

The solution is pretty simple. JS switch statement can accept expressions as comparison keys, so simply do this:

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var rest = require('./rest_route.js');
Http.createServer(function(request,response){
  var url = request.url;
  switch(true){
    case RegExp('/api/1/servers$').test(url):
      rest.servers(request,response);
      break;
    case RegExp('/api/1/servers/\\d').test(url):
      rest.server(request,response);
      break;
    case RegExp('/api/1/nodes').test(url):
      rest.nodes(request,response);
      break;
    case RegExp('/api/1/url/').test(url):
      rest.urlapi(request,response);
      break;
    default:
      response.end();
  }
}).listen(3000);

This may not as consistent as other heavy routers, but it’s really suitable for prototyping a new web app. Have fun and use it to hack your new weekend project!