asynchronous http request in ruby

Question

 require \'net/http\'

urls = [
  {\'link\' => \'http://www.google.com/\'},
  {\'link\' => \'http://www.facebook.com/\'},
 {\'link\' => \'http://www.yahoo.c         


        

Answer 1

Here is a great article covering the topic.

Generally, viable alternatives to using threads for this would be the use of a Fiber or you could use em-http-request. In the latter example you could leave out the callback handling for your particular purpose.

Answer 2

If its just about plain http requests in async style, probably Unirest is the best fit to achieve it.

Asnc request is as simple as:

response = Unirest.post "http://httpbin.org/post", 
                    headers:{ "Accept" => "application/json" }, 
                    parameters:{ :age => 23, :foo => "bar" } {|response|
response.code # Status code
response.headers # Response headers
response.body # Parsed body
response.raw_body # Unparsed body
}

Answer 3

Lightweight Async handling is the job of Threads (as you said) or Fibers.

Otherwise, you should consider EventMachine which is a very powerful tool.

EDIT: The above URL for Event Machine is dead. Here is their GitHub account, https://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine . It serves as a good starting point.