A suitable alternative to Net::HTTP in Ruby

A few weeks back I posted a vent blog entry about some shortcomings of Ruby. Well, it looks like one of my concerns has been at least partially resolved. Hiroshi Nakamura created, and continues to maintain, a wrapper around Net::Http called httpclient which adds enough functionality to save lots of time. Sure the performance still sucks compared to curl, but with this great library you can do multipart form posts and basic cookie functionality. Now my rails app can finally make use of some more complex HTTP based APIs out there (not everything is simple REST). Hiroshi, you rock, but back to my other complaint about Ruby stuff being scattered about the wind, please submit your gems to one of the big repositories so we can find them :)