The Hand of FuManChu

...you should know that CherryPy 3 (soon to be released) includes a Routes dispatcher:

class City:

    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.population = 10000

    def index(self, **kwargs):
        return "Welcome to %s, pop. %s" % (self.name, self.population)

    def update(self, **kwargs):
        self.population = kwargs['pop']
        return "OK"

d = cherrypy._cprequest.RoutesDispatcher()
d.connect(name='hounslow', route='hounslow', controller=City('Hounslow'))
d.connect(name='surbiton', route='surbiton', controller=City('Surbiton'),
          action='index', conditions=dict(method=['GET']))
d.mapper.connect('surbiton', controller='surbiton',
                 action='update', conditions=dict(method=['POST']))

conf = {'/': {'request.dispatch': d}}
cherrypy.tree.mount(root=None, config=conf)
cherrypy.config.update({'environment': 'test_suite'})

You tell CherryPy you want to use Routes dispatching in your app config with "request.dispatch = <obj>". The astute reader will note this means:

1. You can make your own dispatchers for Django-style, regex style, Quixote-style, etc. You can even modify the builtin Routes dispatcher to add HTTP method dispatch or what-have-you.
2. You can use the default CherryPy tree-style dispatcher for most paths, and Routes (or any other style) for select subpaths.

To make your own dispatcher:

1. Make it callable. If it's a class, give it a __call__ method that takes a path_info argument.
2. When called, it should set cherrypy.request.handler to a callable that takes no arguments. This "handler" should be (or should call) the user's application code. The default CherryPy handler, for example, sends virtual path atoms as *args and GET/POST parameters as **kwargs, but if that's not what your dispatch style requires, do something else. It's completely customizable. You can even set request.handler to None if you don't want anything called at that point. Note also that HTTPRedirect and HTTPError (including NotFound) can be used as handlers; when called, they raise self.
3. Set cherrypy.request.config. This should be a flat dictionary of all config entries (from both global and application config) which apply to the current request, based on the path_info argument above. The default CherryPy dispatcher does a lot of work to correctly allow config file entries to override _cp_config entries on the CherryPy object tree. But if your dispatch style doesn't use a tree, you don't need to do all that.

Grab the latest trunk and start playing!