djwonk

Just in the last few minutes I began poking around at various HTTP libraries in Ruby. You’re probably familiar with the old-standby Net::HTTP.  Here are some higher-level alternatives that I have found, largely thanks to a previous blog discussion and reading RESTful Web Services.  I’ve quoted snippets from their home pages to give a quick overview.

• httpclient -”httpclient gives something like the functionality of libwww-perl (LWP) in Ruby.”
• simplehttp – “SimpleHttp – a simplified wrapper around Net::Http SimpleHttp aims to reduce the complexity of Net::Http while providing the most commonly used (by me) http functionality.”
• open-uri – “open-uri.rb is easy-to-use wrapper for net/http, net/https and net/ftp.”
• rest-open-uri – “A drop-in replacement for open-uri, suitable for use as a client for RESTful web services.”
• Mechanize -”The Mechanize library is used for automating interaction with websites. Mechanize automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, can follow links, and submit forms. Form fields can be populated and submitted. Mechanize also keeps track of the sites that you have visited as a history.”
• RFuzz by Zed Shaw – “RFuzz is a Ruby library to easily test web applications from the outside using a fast HttpClient and wicked evil RandomGenerator allowing the average programmer to use advanced fuzzing techniques for just pennies a day.”