need advice: http client / async / danga socket

[oliver oli]

Martin Atkins wrote:
> The current "solution" to this problem is to use Gearman, which is an 
> out-of-process distributed job server — also a Danga thing — that can 
> run asynchronously. This is how LJ Talk authenticates against LiveJournal.

is there ruby support for gearman? the website says it's language 
agnostic, but i guess someone has to write a ruby client :-).

> This is probably an unreasonable requirement for your simple 
> authentication plugin, though. A quick search on CPAN reveals 
> LWP::Parallel::UserAgent, which is intended for making several parallel 
> HTTP requests but also seems, based on a quick perusal, to be suitable 
> for just doing one async request as well. I've not used it, but it might 
> be worth taking a look at.

 From CPAN:

"BUGS: Probably lots! This was meant only as an interim release until 
this functionality is incorporated into LWPng, the next generation 
libwww module (though it has been this way for over 2 years now!)"

> Perlbal (yet another Danga project) also has a basic HTTP client 
> implementation based on Danga::Socket, but I'm not sure how easy it'd be 
> to extract from Perlbal and re-use.

I have browsed the Perbal sources, before I asked for advice, but I 
couldn't figure out how to reuse the http stuff from Perlbal. My little 
problem is, that I'm not a Perl programmer and I find this asynchronous 
socket thingie hard to grasp. (On the other hand it's even harder for me 
to understand Ejabberd/Erlang and the Java server are also not an option).

Thanks for all the help, I will try to figure it out :-)

Oli