httpotato¶ ↑

Makes http fun AND fast!

Releases are tagged on github and also released as gems on github and rubyforge. Master is pushed to whenever I add a patch or a new feature. To build from master, you can clone the code, generate the updated gemspec, build the gem and install.

• rake gemspec

• gem build httpotato.gemspec

• gem install the gem that was built

• Fork the project.

• Make your feature addition or bug fix.

• Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself in another branch so I can ignore when I pull)

• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

• Easy get, post requests

• Basic http authentication

• Default request query string parameters (ie: for api keys that are needed on each request)

• Automatic parsing of JSON and XML into ruby hashes based on response content-type

See github.com/dnclabs/httpotato/tree/master/examples

httpotato also includes the executable httpotato which can be used to query web services and examine the resulting output. By default it will output the response as a pretty-printed Ruby object (useful for grokking the structure of output). This can also be overridden to output formatted XML or JSON. Execute httpotato --help for all the options. Below is an example of how easy it is.

httpotato "http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.json"

• Crack github.com/jnunemaker/crack/ - For XML parsing.

• JSON github.com/flori/json - For fast JSON parsing. Crack converts it to YAML first and is very slow. Huh?

• You like performance (and potatoes)!

• sudo gem install httpotato