As Pat
mentioned, I've done a http fetching library for Rome. It is now
checked in and available.

It supports HTTP conditional gets
(ie: last modified and ETag handling) and GZip encoded feeds.
It should enable user to write aggregators that follow the
Atom aggregator behaviour recommendations.

Some docs are available (although
this will probably move).

If you are interested, please give it a go and report issues on the Wiki or on the Rome dev mailing list.