![]() It doesn’t look too hard to use but I have skipped a lot of the error handling which you would want in production code and again I had to add Jackson code to parse the JSON response. Overall the API is rather low-level - you are left to implement a lot for yourself. The library also supports synchronous and asynchronous requests. Version 5.0 was released in early 2020, adding HTTP/2 support. The old Commons HttpClient is no longer being developed, and the new version ( also called HttpClient), is under the HttpComponents project. They’re widely-used and are the foundation for a lot of higher-level libraries. The Apache Software Foundation’s HTTP clients have been around for a long time. If the built-in clients don’t work for you, don’t worry! There are plenty of libraries you can bring into your project which will do the job. It returns a Supplier for the APOD class, so we call. I’ve written one ( here) based on Jackson following an example from Java Docs. You can also define your own, which might be helpful as there isn’t a built-in BodyHandler for parsing JSON. There are some built-in handlers: String, byte for binary data, Stream which splits by lines, and a few others. HttpClient accepts a BodyHandler which can convert an HTTP response into a class of your choosing. Libraries that make this difficult will not spark joy in me. It also has the option to make requests synchronously or asynchronously by using the CompletableFuture API.ĩ9 times out of 100 when I make an HTTP request I want to read the response body into my code. This has a much more logical API and can handle HTTP/2, and Websockets. More than twenty years after HttpURLConnection we had Black Panther in the cinemas and a new HTTP client added to Java 11:. I suspect that’s only a small minority of developers, but you might see it in older codebases - for more modern approaches, read on. When would you use HTTPUrlConnection, then? If you are supporting clients who are using older versions of Java, and you can’t add a dependency then this might be for you. If you need to make more complex requests with POST bodies, or custom timeouts etc then it’s all possible but I never found this API intuitive at all. This seems quite verbose, and I find the order that we have to do things is confusing (why do we set headers after opening the URL?). Here’s how you would use it to make a GET request to get the APOD data: Titanic was rocking the box office and inspiring a thousand memes, Spice Girls had a best-selling album, but the biggest news of the year was surely HttpURLConnection being added to Java 1.1. Anyway, close your eyes and center yourself in 1997. Java 1.1 HttpURLConnectionįirst of all, do we capitalize acronyms in class names or not? Make your mind up. One of these might be a good choice if you are sensitive about adding extra dependencies to your project. Since Java 1.1 there has been an HTTP client in the core libraries provided with the JDK. Core Java APIs for making Java http requests I’ll use the Astronomy Picture of the Day API from the NASA APIs for the code samples, and the code is all on GitHub in a project based on Java 11. If you use other ones, that’s great! Let me know about it. ![]() This post will introduce you to the Java HTTP clients that I reach for. For Java programmers there are many ways to do it - core libraries in the JDK and third-party libraries. Making HTTP requests is a core feature of modern programming, and is often one of the first things you want to do when learning a new programming language.
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