Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect, Net::HTTP is clunky. I'm typing the following from memory, too:

    require 'open-uri'
    response = open("http://blog.segment7.net/").read

View on HN

that's great if all you're trying to do is HTTP GET. standard libs are supposed to make all use cases fairly easy. making an http post isn't too bad:

  Net::HTTP.new(host, port).start do |http|
    post = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url)
    post.set_form_data('blah' => '123')
    http.request(post)
  end

That's "not too bad" if you're coming from Java. Thankfully most other Ruby libraries have significantly less verbose APIs than this.

There's a much simpler way to do POSTs with Net::HTTP:

  response = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse("http://example.com"), {:param => "val"})

Personally, I'm a big fan of open-uri for super-simple requests and HTTParty for anything more complex.

If you're doing more than one of those in a single document, having a persistent connection object and sending it request messages wins. (Though open-uri could actually do this, if it cached the connection objects by host:port.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com