routing like in express ???

[Jakub Milkiewicz]

Hi

Today i started learning restify and the first step was to read http://mcavage.me/node-restify/. As i am pretty familiar to express i was expecting that a lot of stuff would simply work the same way. I wasn't disappointed with my assumption as in the guide there are a number references to express. One is in routing section:" in 'basic' mode, is pretty much identical to express/sinatra,". Forgive me as I am not familiar with "express basic mode is" but i found restify routing really different from express:

Restify  3.0.2  code:

var restify = require('restify');

var server = restify.createServer();

server.get('/abcd/:b?', function(req,res,next){

  console.log("with b")    

    next();

});

server.get('/abcd/:a?', function(req,res,next){

  console.log("with a")

    res.send("small");

    next();

}); 

Express 4.12.3 Code :

var express = require('express');

var app = express();

app.get('/abcd/:b?', function(req,res,next){

  console.log("with b")

    next();

});

app.get('/abcd/:a?', function(req,res,next){

  console.log("with a")

    res.send("small");

    next();

});

var server = app.listen(3000)

So basically when i call:

 curl -v http://localhost:<port>/abcd

express:

with b

with a

both printed out on server console

and 

200 returned with body being "small"

restify:

404 is returned {"code":"ResourceNotFound","message":"/abcd does not exist"} 

For

 curl -v http://localhost:<port>/abcd/a

express:

with b

with a

both printed out on server console

and 

200 returned with body being "small"

in restify:

with b

printed out on server console

no reply from Server makes curl hang

Why is all that? Why restify is not calling all matching routes, like express does ? Why restify is not honoring "string" regexpressions "/:a?" 

Am i simply missing sth or restify routing is simply working totally different than express 

br JM