I’ve given over maintenance of RestClient to Julien Kirch (archiloque). He's got a 1.1 release now in Gemcutter/Rubyforge, with some hot new features:
- HTTP multipart POST payloads. Blake Mizerany, Rick Olson, and François Beausoleil all had a hand in getting this implemented. This has been a much-requested feature - no existing Ruby library seems to offer an easy way to do multipart uploads. Great to see it finally making it into the RestClient mainline. It’s as simple as this:
RestClient.post 'http://example.com/images', :myimage => File.new("image.jpg")
- Nested hash payloads. Like this:
RestClient.post 'http://rest-test.heroku.com/', :nested => { :color => 'red' }
And coming in the next version:
- Mimetype capability, to set content-type or accept headers based on a short symbol from the mime-type gem. Like this:
RestClient.post 'http://rest-test.heroku.com/', { :value => '42' }.to_json, :content_type => :json
In addition, Archiloque has set up a mailing list (send an email to rest.client at librelist dot com to join) and an IRC channel on freenode, #rest-client. If you’re interested in the continuing development of restclient, tune in on both of these.
P.S. Nick Quaranto recently posted some download stats from Gemcutter/Rubyforge, and it appears that RestClient is the 70th most popular Ruby gem (though this is perhaps a result of being a dependency for some other popular gems). All the more reason I’m glad to see it go into the hands of an active maintainer.