Rails newbie (though long time programmer) here. I'm writing an test app that retrieves data from several outside sources (think Twitter, RSS feeds, etc.) and under certain circumstances, it stores that data in a db (or presents it to the user). The data model and the views are trivial. What I'm having difficulty with is making the actual xml HTTP call to the outside source and deserialize the xml response so I can query/use it in my controller/helper. What library/gem should I use to accomplish this? I tried looking this up around the net, but only came up with some article from 2006 which, knowing how fast Rails has developed, might well be completely deprecated. Your help is much appreciated.