php Zend / MVC without mod_rewrite

Question

I\'ve seen it mentioned in many blogs around the net, but I believe it shoud be discussed here. What can we do when we have an MVC framework (I am interested in ZEND) in PHP but

Answer 1

mod_rewrite is almost essential in today's hosting environment..but unfortunately not everyone got the message.

Lots of the large php programs (I'm thinking magento, but most can cope) have a pretty-url fall back mode for when mod_rewrite isn't available.

URLs end up looking like www.site.com/index.php?load-this-page

They must be running some magic to grab the variable name from the $_GET variable and using it as the selector for what module/feature to execute.

In a related note, I've seen lots of messed up URLs in the new facebook site where it's using the #. So links look like www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/inbox/ Clearly we're not meant to see that but it suggests that they're probably parsing the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] variable.