mattetti / fire-and-forget

[Not maintained] Very dumb HTTP "client" that fires requests and doesn't care about the response.

Fire and Forget HTTP client

You probably don't need this gem. Think of a it as a HTTP client that doesn't care about the response once it sent its request and doesn't care about basically anything besides sending its payload to a server and making sure the connection was established.

So, unless you are really sure you want to use this lib, you're probably better off looking at the many other Ruby HTTP libraries out there.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'fire-and-forget', :require => 'fire/forget'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install fire-and-forget

Usage

FAF.post "http://example.com", {:foo => 'bar'}, {"X-Header" => true}

In the example above, the request will be sent as a JSON request and the body (a Ruby hash) will be converted to json if to_json is available on the object (otherwise to_s will be used).

FAF.post "http://example.com", "{\"language\": {\"created_at\": \"2010/11/23 19:47:05 +0000\",\"updated_at\": \"2010/11/23 19:47:05 +0000\",\"active\": true, \"code\": \"en\", \"id\":37}}"

Would send the request passing the JSON string as the body, strings aren't converted when passed as the request body.

Sometimes, you might want to debug the response or potentially slow down the application code. You can pass a block to do that:

FAF.post "http://example.com", {:foo => 'bar'} do
  sleep(0.02) # sleep 20ms before closing the socket
end

or

FAF.post "http://example.com", {:foo => 'bar'} do |socket|
  while output = socket.gets
    print output
  end
end

Note that the block is executed before the connection is closed which is important if you want the client to wait before closing the socket, or if you want to read.

This approach wont "forget" about the response, but instead wait for data to come down the socket so we can print it.

If you are interested in waiting for a minimum of x ms but stop waiting as soon as something comes back from the socket, you can use select:

FAF.get "http://github.com/mattetti" do |socket|
  IO.select([socket], nil, nil, 0.02)
end

The code above would make a request and will wait for a response from the socket or will close the socket after 20ms. It's a nice way to set a max waiting response time on your client.

Currently, FAF only supports basic options, no authentication unless you pass all the details via the headers.

Once the request is sent, the socket is closed which might or might not please the server receiving the request (you might want to use a block/sleep to slow down the closing of the socket if your proxy/cache doesn't like that FAF closes the connection right away.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request