Formerly known as WebGet, the Python libraries have been ported over to Ruby. Think of this package as a front-end wrapper to the net/http library acting as a lite weight browser capable of handling session management.

You can view the API documentation here.

To download click here.

Around this time last year I decided to switch languages and regress back to Python.  I guess the main reason was all the add-ons that were being discussed and I wanted to double check I wasn’t missing out on anything since I had left a year or two earlier. At the time I had no real inspiration to write anything in particular, so I focused on writing a wrapper for the Pyton urllib libraries. The idea was to make an object that acted much the same as a lite browser. Basically you could load it up with a URL and any authentication necesary (basic auth, ntlm, cookies, etc) and feed it file paths – The browser should just handle the rest.

The high level plan was to write a wrapper that handled HTTP requests and then place a front-end on it (command line and later a GUI). I drew most of my inspiration from mechanize to build the wrapper and noticed the front-end was just another (albeit smaller) version of cURL. In the end I decided to drop the project due to the rejection of PEP 268 - Due to Python’s design, it is impossible to tunnel anything over a proxy and keep the the same level of authentication and/or SSL.

FYI, I called the project WebGet and the only conceivable use for it is code re-use in other projects. It is licensed under GPL and you can find it here.

Anyway, enough about the past…

This long weekend I decided to take a couple of hours out and based on the above design I ported WebGet over to Ruby. Once it has passed unit testing I will release it in the resources section of the web site.