- For web agents: {FTW::Agent}
- For dns: {FTW::DNS}
- For tcp connections: {FTW::Connection}
- For tcp servers: {FTW::Server}
net/http is pretty much not good. Additionally, DNS behavior in ruby changes quite frequently.
I primarily want two things in both client and server operations:
- A consistent API with good documentation, readable code, and high quality tests.
- Modern web features: websockets, spdy, etc.
Desired features:
- Awesome documentation
- A HTTP client that acts as a full user agent, not just a single connections. (With connection reuse)
- HTTP and SPDY support.
- WebSockets support.
- SSL/TLS support.
- Browser Agent features like cookies and caching
- An API that lets me do what I need.
- Server and Client modes.
- Support for both normal operation and EventMachine would be nice.
For reference:
- DNS in Ruby stdlib is broken, so I need to provide my own DNS api.
Reference: {FTW::Agent}
agent = FTW::Agent.new
request = agent.get("http://www.google.com/")
response = request.execute
puts response.body.read
# Simpler
response = agent.get!("http://www.google.com/").read
puts response.body.read
- This is not implemented yet
SPDY should automatically be attempted. The caller should be unaware.
I do not plan on exposing any direct means for invoking SPDY.
# 'http(s)' or 'ws(s)' urls are valid here. They will mean the same thing.
websocket = agent.websocket!("http://somehost/endpoint")
websocket.publish("Hello world")
websocket.each do |message|
puts :received => message
end
I have implemented a rack server, Rack::Handler::FTW. It does not comply fully with the Rack spec. See 'Rack Compliance Issues' below.
Under the FTW rack handler, there is an environment variable added, "ftw.connection". This will be a FTW::Connection you can use for CONNECT, Upgrades, etc.
There's also a websockets wrapper, FTW::WebSockets::Rack, that will help you specifically with websocket requests and such.
Due to some awkward and bad requirements - specifically those around the specified behavior of 'rack.input' - I can't support the rack specification fully.
The 'rack.input' must be an IO-like object supporting #rewind which rewinds to the beginning of the request.
For high-data connections (like uploads, HTTP CONNECT, and HTTP Upgrade), it's not practical to hold the entire history of time in a buffer. We'll run out of memory, you crazy fools!
Details here: rack/rack#347
Here are some related projects that I have no affiliation with:
- https://github.com/igrigorik/em-websocket - websocket server for eventmachine
- https://github.com/faye/faye - pubsub for the web (includes a websockets implementation)
- https://github.com/faye/faye-websocket-ruby - websocket client and server in ruby
- https://github.com/lifo/cramp - real-time web framework (async, websockets)
- https://github.com/igrigorik/em-http-request - HTTP client for EventMachine
- https://github.com/geemus/excon - http client library
Given some of the above (especially the server-side stuff), I'm likely try and integrate with those projects. For example, writing a Faye handler that uses the FTW server, if the FTW web server even stays around.