title: Django, Rails Routing...Point?
body: <p>I'm a student of web development (and college), so my apologies if this comes off sounding naive and offensive, I certainly don't mean it that way.  My experience has been with PHP and with a smallish project on the horizon (a glorified shift calendar) I hoped to learn one of the higher level frameworks to ease the code burden. So far, I looked at CakePHP Symfony Django and Rails.</p>
  
  <p>With PHP, the URLs mapped very simply to the files, and it "just worked". It was quick for the server, and intuitive. But with all of these frameworks, there is this inclination to "pretty up" the URLs by making them map to different functions and route the parameters to different variables in different files. </p>
  
  <p>"The Rails Way" book that I'm reading admits that this is dog slow and is the cause of most performance pains on largish projects.  My question is "why have it in the first place?"?  Is there a specific point in the url-maps-to-a-file paradigm (or mod_rewrite to a single file) that necessitates regexes and complicated routing schemes? Am I missing out on something by not using them?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance!</p>