curl 5.0.0 is on CRAN A new major version of the curl package has been released to CRAN. This release both brings internal improvements as well as new user-facing functionality, in particular with respect to concurrent downloads. From the NEWS file:curl 5.0.0 - New function multi_download() which supports concurrent downloads and resuming download for large files, while giving detailed progress information.

A new version of vcr was just released. See the release notes for all the details. I want to highlight a few of the more notable changes.New contributor vcr has a new author: Maëlle Salmon.

Testing is a crucial component to any software package. Testing makes surethat your code does what you expect it to do; and importantly, makes it safer to makechanges moving forward because a good test suite will tell you if a change has brokenexisting functionality. Our recent community call on testing is a niceplace to get started with testing. One way to make testing even harder is through including HTTP requests.

R package test suites that include HTTP requests are dependent on an internet connection being up, the internet connection speed, changing behavior of the remote server, as well as changing response formats/data from a remote server. We ideally want to test functionality of our package relative to some known data that isn’t intermittently unavailable or changing.

webmockr webmockr is an R library for stubbing and setting expectations on HTTP requests.It is a port of the Ruby gem webmock. webmockr works by plugging in to another R package that does HTTP requests. It currently only works with crul right now, but we plan to add support for curl and httr later.

HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a protocol by which mostof us interact with the web. When we do requests to a website in a browseron desktop or mobile, or get some data from a server in R, all of that isusing HTTP.