>Your described use case for a "friendly / internal" system has a limited definition in any non-trivial sized organization.
Facebook is a non-trivial size company that has lots of internal private-facing programs with embedded http connectivity. From that experience, they open sourced Proxygen http library which is one of the links I mentioned in the previous comment.
Also, see the comment from VikingCoder which in turn links to reddit thread mentioning another big company like Google doing similar use cases with http libraries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15671936