comparison of the most popular Ruby HTTP clients

1. Ruby HTTP clients
Full Stack Landscape

2. Report by Hiroshi Nakamura
http://bit.ly/RubyHTTPClients2012
http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/03/04/whats-up-with-ruby-http-libraries/

3. Taxonomy by Hiroshi Nakamura
http://bit.ly/RubyHTTPClients2012

4. My Taxonomy
• gems based on TCPSocket (a Ruby C library):
Net::HTTP (built-in Ruby) , HTTPClient
• gems based on eventmachine (C++ library):
EM-HTTP-Request, Excon
• 3 groups of "wrapper gems":
• HTTParty, HTTP.rb, Rest-Client use Net::HTTP as "backend"
• Typhoeus, Curb, Patron use libcurl (a C library)
• Faraday have adapter for: Net::HTTP (default), HTTPClient,
EM-HTTP-Request, Excon, Typhoeus, Patron

5. Avdi's Survey
http://devblog.avdi.org/2015/10/16/results-of-ruby-http-client-library-survey/

6. Avdi's Survey (Top 10)
• HTTParty "simplicity and ease of use"
• Faraday "ability to modify its behavior with middlewares, swap backend libraries"
• Net::HTTP "built-in, no extra dependency, robustness and stability"
• Rest-Client “easy api, just works, can do file uploads”
• HTTPClient “thread-safe, uses keepalive, fast, supports http streaming.”
• Excon “easy to use, customize, easy to handle errors, has feature to debug”
• HTTP.rb “thread safety (jRuby), a sane API for SSL (e.g. mutual auth)”
• Typhoeus “concurrent requests and multipart posts actually work.”
• Curb “benchmarks showed that curb is by far the fastest one.”
• Patron “nicer API than Curb, easy to set timeout, easy to log and do REST actions.”
http://devblog.avdi.org/2015/10/16/results-of-ruby-http-client-library-survey/

7. Popularity (Top 5)
Survey Stars
HTTParty 25.5% 3.569
Faraday 24.9% 3.027
Net::HTTP 12.7% -
Rest-Client 10.9% 3.258
Typhoeus 6% 2.737
HTTPClient 5.2% 501
HTTP.rb 3.5% 1.206
Excon 3.3% 710
Curb 2.9% 945
Patron 0.9% 466

8. Samples
for Top 5

9. HTTParty

10. Faraday

11. Faraday adapters
Survey Stars
HTTParty 25.5% 3.569
Faraday 24.9% 3.027
Net::HTTP 12.7% -
Rest-Client 10.9% 3.258
Typhoeus 6% 2.737
HTTPClient 5.2% 501
HTTP.rb 3.5% 1.206
Excon 3.3% 710
Curb 2.9% 945
Patron 0.9% 466
em-http-request - 1.064

12. Rest-Client
a simple DSL for accessing HTTP and REST resources

13. Typhoeus

14. Speed Test by @nahi

15. Speed Test by @nahi

16. Speed Test by @tarcieri
https://github.com/httprb/http/blob/master/README.md

17. Net::HTTP implementation

18. The Simples HTTP Get
require 'net/http'
puts Net::HTTP.get('www.google.com', '/')
"pure TCP socket" HTTP GET
(without Net::HTTP)
based on RFC 2616
https://gist.github.com/zmajstor/
94b85c7821b129f71ad6
https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/
trunk/ext/socket/socket.c

19. TCPServer - TCPSocket
https://gist.github.com/
zmajstor/
94b85c7821b129f71ad6

20. The End