Recently I have been talking about a new, very young tool called Jerakia which can be used along side of, or in place of Hiera. Part of the Jerakia roadmap was adding an HTTP datasource and it would have meant a lot of wheel re-inventing to implement since hiera-http had all the HTTP specific stuff built in. The HTTP components of hiera-http have been farmed out to lookup_http and hiera-http implements the lookup_http methods for the HTTP side of things meaning that other tools (such as Jerakia) can also use the library.
Despite being a 2.0 release, there should be no breaking changes if packages are installed using gem and the lookup_http gem is instaled as a dependancy.