Typhoeus, the best Ruby HTTP client just got better

I've been quietly working on Typhoeus for the last few months. With the help of Wilson Bilkovich and David Balatero I've finished what I think is a significant improvement to the library. The new interface removes all the magic and opts instead for clarity.

It's really slick and includes improved stubing support, caching, memoization, and (of course) parallelism. The Typhoeus readme highlights all of the awesomeness. It should be noted that the old interface of including Typhoeus into classes and defining remote methods has been deprecated. I'll be removing that sometime in the next six months.

In addition to thanking everyone using the library and everyone contributing, I should also thank my employer kgbweb. If you're a solid Rubyist that likes parsing, crawling, and stuff, or a machine learning guy, or a Solr/Lucene/indexing bad ass, let me know. We need you and we're doing some crazy awesome stuff.

Comments

[quinn shanahan]

I love the new api. In this example

response = Typhoeus::Request.get("http://www.pauldix.net")

if i was instead to do

response = Typhoeus::Request.get("https://www.pauldix.net")

would it be clever enough to use ssl and port 443? if it did that would be awesome.

[Paul Dix]

I'm pretty sure it does that. At least, I think libcurl does that automagically.

[Stockbaat]

can I do HEAD requests using typhoeus ?

[Paul Dix]

The main Hydra, Request interface doesn't, but using the basic Easy object should work for HEAD requests.

[Chris]

I'm loving your work, kudos...

[betabug]

Would you mind adding a short note to the readme, reminding the users to follow basic netiquette and the robots.txt conventions?

It's not like you are responsible for what people do with your code, but maybe it could help calm down some of the lusers who will invariably do stupid things - like the one I already saw spidering my server with Typhoeus.

Oh, and I hope you are aware of the link of the name with the disease?

[Paul Dix]

Sure, I can add that in. The disease you're thinking of is either typhus or typhoid fever, neither of which have a relation to each other or the source of the name for this library.

The name is a reference to a greek god of the same name that was the father of Hydra. He's more commonly known as Typhon.

[betabug]

Yeah, I'm familiar with the names of Greek gods. I would say that these things do have a relation, unless being based on the same roots of words doesn't count. In (especially ancient) Greek, the thing and the god (or more general the mythological entity) are one and the same, so a typhoid fever and the god typhos are hard to distinguish. Another example is Kronos, which is one of the titans and at the same time "time". You couldn't name something after that titan without getting a relation to time in there.

I'm not saying you should change the name of your library, just be aware of the connection.