A streaming REST client for Ruby that uses libcurl

Features

• rest-client like API
• Streaming API allows the caller to be handed chunks of the response while it's being received
• uses Encoding.default_internal (otherwise falls back to utf-8) for strings it hands back in 1.9

How to install

Nothing special about it, just:

sudo gem install streamly

Example of use

A basic HEAD request

Streamly.head 'www.somehost.com'

Or streaming

Streamly.head 'www.somehost.com' do |header_chunk|
  # do something with header_chunk
end

You can also pass a Hash of headers

Streamly.head 'www.somehost.com', {"User-Agent" => "Your Mom"}

A basic GET request

Streamly.get 'www.somehost.com'

Or streaming

Streamly.get 'www.somehost.com' do |body_chunk|
  # do something with body_chunk
end

You can also pass a Hash of headers

Streamly.get 'www.somehost.com', {"User-Agent" => "Your Mom"}

A basic POST request

Streamly.post 'www.somehost.com', 'blah=foo'

Or streaming

Streamly.post 'www.somehost.com', 'blah=foo' do |body_chunk|
  # do something with body_chunk
end

You can also pass a Hash of headers

Streamly.post 'www.somehost.com', 'blah=foo', {"User-Agent" => "Your Mom"}

A basic PUT request

Streamly.put 'www.somehost.com', 'blah=foo'

Or streaming

Streamly.put 'www.somehost.com', 'blah=foo' do |body_chunk|
  # do something with body_chunk
end

You can also pass a Hash of headers

Streamly.put 'www.somehost.com', 'blah=foo', {"User-Agent" => "Your Mom"}

A basic DELETE request

Streamly.delete 'www.somehost.com'

Or streaming

Streamly.delete 'www.somehost.com' do |body_chunk|
  # do something with body_chunk
end

You can also pass a Hash of headers

Streamly.delete 'www.somehost.com', {"User-Agent" => "Your Mom"}

== Benchmarks

Fetching 2,405,005 bytes of JSON from a local lighttpd server

• Streamly: 0.011s
• Shell out to curl: 0.046s
• rest-client: 0.205s

Streaming, and parsing 2,405,005 bytes of JSON from a local lighttpd server

• Streamly: 0.231s
• Shell out to curl: 0.341s
• rest-client: 0.447s

Other Notes

This library was basically an exercise in dealing with libcurl in C.

Special Thanks

There are quite a few extremely nice REST client libraries out there for Ruby today. I especially owe thanks to the following projects. Without them I probably would have never had the inspiration to even take the time to write this library. In Streamly, you'll find snippets of code, API patterns and examples from all 3 of these projects. I'll do my best to make sure I give credit where it's due in the source. Please let me know if I've missed something!

• rest-client - https://github.com/adamwiggins/rest-client
• curb - https://github.com/taf2/curb
• patron - https://github.com/toland/patron

And again, the Github crew for this amazing service!