Why use Faraday over Net::HTTP?

Question

Why would someone use the Faraday gem vs directly using Net::HTTP? What is the benefit of using a wrapper like this?

Creeper

This is going to draw opinions, not facts. – Decoy

There are objective reasons to use Faraday over Net::HTTP. – Angeloangelology

Answer 1

Using the Net::HTTP adapter directly is fine, it's just binding your code to a particular interface which may differ from alternate tools. The main reason one would use Faraday is that it wraps multiple adapters, one of which is Net::HTTP. If you're using Faraday and start out with Net:HTTP, you can later decide to use Excon, Typhoeus, Patron or EventMachine without changing more than a line or two of configuration. Had you used Net::HTTP directly, you'd have to change a lot of implementation-specific code to switch to another adapter.

Engrail

Good explanation. You should also mention middleware. For example, I use JSON middleware to automatically encode my request as JSON and decode the response from JSON. – Angeloangelology

Faraday should also help normalize exceptions across all of the libraries as well, correct? – Creeper

Yes @user3084728, Faraday will catch each adapter's exceptions and re-throw them as Faraday exceptions. – Engrail