🛣️ Server Router

In this section, we discuss how to use the FlashServer router to manage our RequestHandler instances. The router is used to define route endpoints and their corresponding handler, which are executed when a request is made to the server.

The FlashServer router is an instance of the RouteController class, each server instance has its own router instance. To access the router instance, you can call the route() method on either the internal server or your FlashServer instance.

Creating a Route

To create a route, you need to call the route() method on your server's instance (in this case for simplicity, on the InternalFlashServer) and specify the base path of the route, followed by your handler class and optionally a RouteInterceptor instance.

(More on the concept of RouteInterceptor in the following sections).

// Example.java
import static flash.InternalFlashServer.*;

public class Example {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        port(8080);
        
        route("/api")
            .register(MyHandler.class);
            
        start();
    }
}

// MyHandler.java
import flash.Request;
import flash.Response;
import flash.models.RequestHandler;

@RouteInfo(method = HttpMethod.GET, path = "/hello", enforceNonNullBody = false)
public class MyHandler extends RequestHandler {
    public MyHandler(Request req, Response res) {
        super(req, res);
    }

    @Override
    public Object handle() {
        String response = "Hello, world!";
        return response;
    }
}

In the example above, we create a route /api and register the MyHandler class to handle requests on the /api/hello endpoint.

This is because the path property of the RouteInfo annotation is relative to the base path of the route, which in this case is /api.

Visiting /api/hello from your browser will result in the response Hello, world!.