laravel 4.2 Router objects

Question

I am working on laravel project to learn the framework, i have a question comes in my mind about routing.
Is the router a singleton class? because i try the following in the route.php file

$route1 = App::make('router');
$route2 = App::make('router');
$route3 = App::make('router');
$route4 = App::make('router');

$route1->get('/r1', function(){
    echo "route 1";
});

$route2->get('/r2', function(){
    echo "route 2";
});

$route3->get('/r3', function(){
    echo "route 3";
});

$route3->get('/r4', function(){
    echo "route 4";
});

var_dump($route1->getRoutes());

as you see i have create four objects of router class, each object add one route. last line prints the routes for $route1 object, and the output is.

object(Illuminate\Routing\RouteCollection)[112]
  protected 'routes' => 
    array (size=2)
      'GET' => 
        array (size=4)
          'r1' => 
            object(Illuminate\Routing\Route)[120]
              ...
          'r2' => 
            object(Illuminate\Routing\Route)[122]
              ...
          'r3' => 
            object(Illuminate\Routing\Route)[124]
              ...
          'r4' => 
            object(Illuminate\Routing\Route)[126]
              ...

The output shows that the $route1 object have the other routes created by $route2 , $route3 , and $route4 objects.
How the routs shared between them?

Answer 1

You have two components here a route and a route collection. When you register a route they all get added to a route collection. The best to show you is by seeing the symfony route components. http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/routing/introduction.html

You have a route, route collection, request, and url matcher.

You create routes and gather them in a route collection.

The get the request url and use the matcher to match the url with the route.