Comments on: Announcing Patron: a Ruby HTTP client library

By: Derek Kastner

Derek Kastner — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:29:45 +0000

Nice work! Looks like we’ve been working on scratching the same itch. I and my coworkers put together CurbFu as a simple wrapper for Curb (http://github.com/gdi/curb-fu). I like Patrion’s idea of keeping an HTTP session open. I had that on my own wish list for CurbFu, but we’ve been focusing lately on integrating CurbFu with Rack::Test to make an easy cross-application testing framework. I also like the idea of going straight to libcurl instead of depending on Curb.

By: phil

phil — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:01:45 +0000

@Heston, That change fixed it for me. Does your version of libcurl have SSL support compiled in? The default version on Leopard does, as does the MacPorts version, but I think you have to install extra packages under Linux. It has been a while since I have had to build Patron under Linux, so I don’t remember the details.

By: Heston

Heston — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:58:34 +0000

@phil: I saw the change you mentioned in github changing “CURL_GLOBAL_NOTHING” to “CURL_GLOBAL_ALL.” I made this patch myself and rebuilt the extension, but I still get the context error. Is there something else I’m missing? Thanks.

By: irv

irv — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:46:20 +0000

Just 10 minutes ago I proposed a small project to my boss that will benefit greatly from using Patron. One of us has great timing!

By: Patron: A Simpler Ruby HTTP Client for Ruby

Patron: A Simpler Ruby HTTP Client for Ruby — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:56:05 +0000

[…] provides more background about his design choices on his blog. You can find Patron on Github or install it as a […]

By: phil

phil — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:27:56 +0000

Heston: I recently fixed this issue. I am going to push the changes to GitHub soon and will release version 0.4 sometime this weekend.

By: Heston

Heston — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:20:57 +0000

I'm enjoying Patron a lot. It's very easy to work with. However, I'm getting the following error trying to connect to https sites: "SSL: couldn't create a context!"

Reading up on similar issues in PHP, it seems there may be a strange interaction with openssl linked in libcurl and other openssl usage in Ruby. Do you have any thoughts on that?

By: phil

phil — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:20:06 +0000

LeMarsu: Patron doesn’t currently support this, but it shouldn’t be difficult to add. I will try to get it into Patron 1.0.

By: LeMarsu

LeMarsu — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:35:00 +0000

That's really good news ! I've just look quickly the documentation. Based on what I've seen, if I download a small or big file, the whole file will be downloaded in memory, and then, I can write it to a file.

Is there a way, or will it have a way to get the chunks donwloaded as they come, without putting everything in memory ? I know Net::HTTP can do this, even if Net::HTTP as serious performance issues.

Anyway, very interesting work.

By: James Sanders

James Sanders — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:37:13 +0000

Oh my goodness thank you! I can't tell you how much I've bashed my head against net/http in my time with ruby, the whole time thinking that in such an active and modern community somebody must have written something better. Every time I asked the question (to friends or google or whoever) it was always open-uri or curb, which have bad underlying client problems and bad api problems respectively. You've taken the right back-end and put a real api on top of it and based on my first little toying around, I'm guessing I'll be greatly indebted to you for it. Nice work!