What

This tiny little library is an example of code I wrote for LisaUSA when I was tasked with migrating LISA from REE to JRuby.

Why

Prior to the migration LISA made use of a curl gem for some web service requests. This gem was not JRuby friendly (libcurl has C extensions that are not supported for JRuby).

I was not interested in reengineering how these web services operated so I set out to recreate the libcurl behaviors we were using with the REE version of LISA. This way I was able to just drop Rurl in place.

I was not able to find a lot of help on the tubes when I set out on this task so I thought I'd publish an example of what I did to make this all work. My employer agreed and so here it is.

How

• You'll need apache commons http-client and have them somewhere java_import can find it.
• Have conn_manager and rurl be available to your app. We're a rails shop so all of this is in our lib dir.
• I used JarJar to package up the common libs to avoid version conflicts with torquebox (hacky i know). You'll want to change the associated java_imports back to the proper package name.

Modes

There are two ways to perform a connection with Rurl.

One shot

do something like this:

url = "http://your.webservice.com"
timeout = 250.seconds
@connection = Rurl.new(url, timeout)
Timeout::timeout(timeout) { @connection.perform }
str = @connection.body_str

Chunky

Using a parser to analyze the results as it comes down the wire.

doc    = SearchResultsDocument.new
parser = Nokogiri::XML::SAX::Parser.new(doc)
http_request = lambda {
  connection         = Rurl.new(url, MAX_SECONDS)
  connection.headers = LISA_HTTP_HEADER

  begin
    connection.perform do |data|
         parser << data
	end
	
  rescue Nokogiri::XML::SyntaxError => se
    log "#{se.class}: Error: #{se}: URL: #{url}"
  end
}

Timeout::timeout(MAX_SECONDS) { http_request.call }

doc.results

NoteL SearchResultsDocument isa Nokogiri::XML::SAX::Document that helps us parse our xml. and LISA_HTTP_HEADER is simply our connection headers.

ConnManager

It is possible to use ConnManager on it's own if you just want something that can supply you with an httpconnection.

ConnManager will serve up DefaultHttpClients all day long, change the code if you want something fancier.

Later

I hope this helps someone out, or if you can help me out by pointing out bugs or better ways of doing things with this code let me know!

Thanks for checking it out.