Announcing Patron: a Ruby HTTP client library
Jul 3rd, 2009 by phil
I was recently given the opportunity to release several of the projects I was working on at The Hive as open source. These projects are libraries that we built to address specific problems we ran into but were not core to our business. Most of these were always destined to be released, it just took a while before we got around to it. Everything is currently on my GitHub page, but I wanted to do a little cleanup on each project and announce them individually.
Today I am announcing the first of these projects: Patron. Patron is an HTTP client library for Ruby that features a usable API and good performance. As for the name Patron, I searched through the thesaurus looking for synonyms for the word “client”.
The performance problems with the built-in Ruby HTTP client are well documented elsewhere, so I won’t go into that here. The other alternative is the Curb gem which is based on libcurl and offers great performance. Unfortunately, curb is unfinished and doesn’t appear to have an official maintainer. Also, the API leaves much to be desired. These issues are compounded by the fact that curb is primarily implemented in C and is difficult to modify.
I tried to patch curb to get all of the features we wanted, but subtle bugs kept creeping in. Eventually I gave in and wrote Patron. The goal was to have a Ruby HTTP client built on libcurl with a reasonable API. By implementing as much as possible in Ruby I think that Patron is much more maintainable than curb.
I have not made an attempt to support every feature of libcurl. Libcurl is huge and trying to support every feature would lead to bloat and make it harder to maintain. Instead, I built a small API that did what we needed it to do. It has been in use at The Hive for some time now and seems pretty stable.
The documentation for Patron is on Rubyforge and the source code is available on GitHub.
