HTTP on the command-line

2008-07-20 @ 16:18#

while it's nothing new, i'm starting to get the 'HTTP-REST on the command-line' religion. this post sums up my present thinking nicely (some good follow-up comments there, too.).

my most recent project (SSDS.EXE) leads me to start thinking like this. see, now i can interact with data in the cloud with simple command-line statements like this:

ssds /resource-collection/ post data.xml
ssds /resource-collection/ get
ssds /resource-collection/id-123 get >id-123.xml

since i'm working on the Windows platform, i need a few other tools to get me started (primarily an XSLT processor - this one will proly do nicely).

while the direct interaction w/ HTTP is relatively easy (WGET is a good solution), there's one item i think still needs some work - HTTP meta-data (the headers). see, truely interacting with HTTP is more than just GET | transform | POST, etc. to do it well, you need full interaction with the header collection (both Request and Response headers).

i can imagine a command-line utility that does the GET/POST and then keeps the headers in an addressable as a collection (memory, state on disk?), for you to use in further interactions. i'll have to noodle a bit. someone musta solved this, right?

code