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:

Paul Buchheit points out that gzip makes any web app faster. (All apps deployed to Heroku automatically compress pages they serve, by virtue of passing through Nginx’s gzip filter on the way out.)

John Nunemaker created HTTParty, a library for making web requests. So the options for making web calls from Ruby are now:

Here’s my slides from Railsconf. More thoughts to come once I recover a bit more - it was pretty intense for my partners and I this year, what with doing three talks and manning a booth.

REST appealed to me right from the get-go. But it’s taken me a surprisingly long time to wrap my head around all of its implications. Some of my recent projects - building the fully RESTful Heroku API, working with Mike Clark on the Nested Resources recipe for his upcoming book, and writing rest-client - have allowed me to finally get a handle on how all the pricinples of REST fit together into a unified whole.

Based on Dan Kubb's suggestion, I’ve implemented an ActiveResource-style accessor for rest-client. This also supports basic auth, so now:

REST is part of the Ruby Way. Which is why I’m surprised that every time I go to access a RESTful resource, I find myself writing some sort of ad-hoc rest client. Net::HTTP is too low level - you’ve got to write at least three or four fairly dense lines of code even for a relatively simple GET or PUT.

I often find myself needing to make some sort of an HTTP request (ajax or rest) in which the data being passed by the call is a single uniform block of data. For those situations I’ve become fond of just passing the data as the payload of the POST, and bypassing the CGI protocol altogether.