Re: Rack as a client-side spec

[Daniel N <has.sox@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Tim Carey-Smith <g@spork.in> wrote:

>
> Hey there,
>
> I've been dealing with the painful API that is Net::HTTP and RestClient.
>
> It seems to me that it would make sense for there to be a client lib which
> accepted a Rack environment and made a real HTTP request on the wire.
> This would return the Rack response: [status, headers, body] and allow
> people to build tools which worked against a real web-service as well as a
> Rack app.
>
> I've got an implementation for doing this using Mechanize as the backend,
> but it feels to weighty.
> As I would see it, the library would allow the following:
>
>  res = Rack::MockRequest.new(RackClient::HTTP.new).get("/foo", "HTTP_HOST"
>> => "example.org")
>>
>
> Which would result in 'res' containing the data at http://example.org/foo
>
> Does this sound like a good idea? It means we can leverage the power of
> middleware on the client-side too.
>
>  app = Rack::Builder.app do
>>  # For http auth
>>  use RackClient::Auth::Basic, "username", "password"
>>  # For json serialization
>>  use RackClient::JSON
>>  run RackClient::HTTP
>> end
>>
>
> This could probably be wrapped in a nicer API, but I think that shows the
> general idea.
>
> Please tell me I'm missing something insanely stupid and this has been
> thought of and rejected before.
> (Or not...)
>
> Ciao,
> Tim


I really like this idea.  I can think of a couple of things I'd like to use
it for already.

Cheers
Daniel

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