User route

Hi Leo. Let's just focus on what Andrew has done in the first 2 minutes of this video. His code up to that point, just for the userRoute, is as shown below...

//Handle HTTP route GET /:username i.e. /chalkers
function  userRoute(request, response) {
    //if URL == '/...'
    var username = request.url.replace('/', '');
    if(username.length > 0) {

        //get JSON from treehouse    
            //on 'end'
                //show profile
            //on 'error'
                //show error
    }
}

We are writing code for a website but think of it as 2 locations. What a user 'requests' on their browser (local computer), and how our server 'responds' to their request. A user has submitted a request for badge information for 'leomarcocorpuz'. This action results in a GET request being sent to our server using 'https://teamtreehouse.com/leomarcocorpuz'.

We currently have 2 routes defined in the app.js file. There is a '/' detected in the GET request so the userRoute will be the one that determines what response gets sent back to the user.

The first thing we need to isolate is the username, so everything after the domain name including the '/' gets extracted i.e. /leomarcocorpuz. Finally, in order to extract the actual username, we need to effectively remove the '/' by replacing it with ' ' (i.e. nothing).

So long story short, we are not 'creating' a URL, we are simply 'reading' a URL in order to decide what information to send back to the user.