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:

With HTTP basic auth starting to get the cold shoulder (passwords are basically low-complexity symmetric keys, not too hot for truly secure authentication), and OAuth experiencing growing pains, what options are available today for truly secure RESTful authentication?

Cyril Rohr gives us Cacheability, a caching HTTP client which cleverly mashes together RestClient and Rack::Cache. It can cache results in memory, on the filesystem, or in memcached. Grab a copy:

New stuff:

• Access response headers:

RestClient.get('http://example.com/pic.jpg').headers[:content_type]

• Configurable timeout, contributed by Marc-André Cournoyer:

resource = RestClient::Resource.new 'https://example.com', :timeout => 20

• require ‘restclient’ is now the preferred notation, though require ‘rest_client’ will continue to be supported indefinitely.

Restclient 0.8 released with new features:

• The restclient binary can take get/put/post/delete as the first argument:

A few more chances for you to catch me in person:

• Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup, Sept 25 @ 7pm (this Thursday). My presentation is titled: Instant Rails Deployment to Heroku with Git. Heroku’s API and Git integration is our secret weapon, so I’m pleased to be giving a talk focused entirely on these tools.
• RubyConf 08, Nov 7 @ 1:15pm. Blake Mizerany and I will be presenting Lightweight Web Services with Sinatra and RestClient. Besides shamelessly pimping our respective open source projects, we’ll talk about why we think the future is all about small apps loosely coupled into a larger system.

I keep thinking I’ll run out of things to add to RestClient, but then I keep wanting more features. So here comes 0.7, with gzip/deflate support and client-side logs.

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

RestClient 0.6 includes an interactive shell contributed by Blake Mizerany. Lay down your curl, for we now have a Ruby Way to fetch resources at the command line!

gem install rest-client for new features:

• SSL support
• User/password embedded in the url (e.g. https://joe:mypass@example.com)
• Subresource nesting with syntax (e.g. site['posts/1/comments'].get) (more examples)
• Better exception classes with access to the response object and more readable output in irb

The fourth release of rest-client includes a patch from Greg Borenstein that makes it easy to send form-urlencoded data by passing a hash instead of a string as the payload:

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.