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Most Ruby web API libraries use <tt>Net::HTTP</tt> (because it's ubiquitous), but I want to use them in my non-blocking EventMachine-based applications, and I don't want Net::HTTP to block. I therefore wrote this.

Using the magic of Ruby's Fibers, we monkeypatch <tt>Net::HTTP</tt> to use the faster, nonblocking <tt>em-http-request</tt> under the hood. Obviously this will only work from inside the EventMachine event loop, and from within a spawned fiber:

require 'em-net-http'

EM.run do
  Fiber.new do
    Net::HTTP.start('encrypted.google.com', :use_ssl=>true) do |http|
      res = http.get('/search?q=james')
      puts res.body
    end
    EM.stop_event_loop
  end.resume
end

The above will run without blocking your carefully-tuned nonblocking webapp.

There are a few tests (taking advantage of the very useful Mimic gem) that assert that responses are identical to those created by <tt>Net::HTTP</tt>. These are by no means exhaustive; if you're using <tt>Net::HTTP</tt> in some other way and the <tt>em-net-http</tt>'s behaviour is not what you expect, do send me a failing test case.

Currently tested with Ruby (MRI) 2.2.3 and 2.3.1.

Caveat

The <tt>Net::HTTP</tt> API is a many-headed hydra -- I haven't patched much of it. Your mileage may therefore vary. Please feed me patches, pull requests and bug reports!

Thanks