REST Client

Recently I've wanted to access some content from Google Reader. Previously for this I've used both Net::HTTP and Open-URI, both of which work fine. This time, however, I needed to authenticate and grab content from a user account. Open-URI doesn't support the POST method and Net::HTTP seemed like a bit too much work. Enter REST Client:

require 'rest_client'

authresponse=RestClient.post('https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin', :service=>'reader',:Email=>email,:Passwd=>password,:source=>'mreader',:continue=>'http://www.google.com')
if authresponse=~/SID=(.*)/
 sid=$1
end

xml=RestClient.get("http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/-/state/com.google/reading-list", {:Cookie=>"SID=#{sid}"})

As you can see REST Client makes the REST methods GET and POST (also DELETE and PUT) really easy.