Idle Hacking

Curb provides ruby bindings for libcurl.  Last year around this time, I decided to start hacking on curb by adding support for libcurl’s multi interface.   At the time, I remember wanting to have an interface as similar to curl-multi as possible, but with the added benefit of being able to initialize requests using the features of Curl::Easy.   The upside of this approach is any easy handle can be configured and dispatched through a Multi handle in parallel. The downside is the interface can be complicated for simple use cases. To simplify the interface, I added a more direct method for sending multiple concurrent requests.   Here’s how the new interface works:

Curl::Multi.get('http://www.google.com/',
                'http://www.yahoo.com/',
                'http://www.msn.com/') do|easy|
  puts easy.header_str
end

Now that’s great you issue multiple GET requests using a default easy handle configuration. As each request is completed, it yield’s passing the easy handle to the block.

The get method also can be passed 2 additional Hash arguments that configure each easy handle and the multi handle.  For example,

Curl::Multi.get('http://www.google.com/',
                'http://www.yahoo.com/',
                'http://www.msn.com/',
                {:follow_location => true},
                {:pipeline => true}) do|easy|
  puts easy.header_str
end

You can try it out using my github branch or stay tuned I should have a new release ready for rubyforge soon.

Also, I thought it would be nice to reflect on many of the changes collected over the course of the year…

• on_failure callbacks now include curb error codes as well as the easy handle.
• Multi Interface
• Support obscure error codes from sites like yahoo.com
• Ruby 1.9 support
• Support setting cookies
• Curl::Easy requests do not block other ruby threads
• Put support for uploading large files
• Updated to latest libcurl, including many new error codes
• Cent OS 4.5 support
• Improve build extconf.rb to auto detect curl-config
• Numerous other fixes and enhancements contributed

All of that and we have a new release: 0.4.2 on rubyforge.org.

   gem install curb

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