[jasim]

Using sensible wrappers around Net::HTTP would resolve the issues with the unreasonable defaults.

Wrest (http://github.com/kaiwren/wrest) would be a good-fit here: it defaults to VERIFY_PEER for SSL connections, has client-side caching support, comes with a fluent API, redirect support, callbacks, patron (curl) back-end etc. etc.

The project is being actively maintained, and we're working to add async support using EM for now.