Apache HttpClient - Tutorial
Version 1.2
Copyright © 2008 - 2012 Lars Vogel
23.08.2012
Revision History | |||
---|---|---|---|
Revision 0.1 | 03.10.2008 | Lars Vogel | First Version |
Revision 0.2 - 1.2 | 01.05.2009 - 23.08.2012 | Lars Vogel | bug fixes and enhancements |
Table of Contents
The Apache HttpClient library simplifies handling HTTP requests. To use this library download the binaries with dependencies from http://hc.apache.org/ and add then to your project class path.
You retrieve and send data via the HttpClient
class. An instance of this class can be created with new DefaultHttpClient();
DefaultHttpClient
is the standard HttpClient and uses the SingleClientConnManager
class to handle HTTP connections. SingleClientConnManager
is not thread-safe, this means that access to it via several threads will create problems.
The HttpClient uses a HttpUriRequest
to send and receive data. Important subclass ofHttpUriRequest
are HttpGet
and HttpPost
. You can get the response of the HttpClient as an InputStream.
The following examples do not necessary work out of the box as we do not provide the required backend for receiving the data. Think of the following as examples how to setup HttpClients. Download the HttpClient libraries from the Apache Website, you can download the "bin" package it includes all dependencies.
Create a new Java project de.vogella.web.httpclient, and add them to the path of your Java project. We use the project for creating our tests.
The following is an example an HTTP Get request via HttpClient
.
HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpGet request = new HttpGet("http://www.vogella.com"); HttpResponse response = client.execute(request); // Get the response BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader(response.getEntity().getContent())); String line = ""; while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) { textView.append(line); }
The following will send a post request to the URL "http://vogellac2dm.appspot.com/register" and include a parameter "registrationid" which an random value.
package de.vogella.web.httpclient; import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStreamReader; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import org.apache.http.HttpResponse; import org.apache.http.NameValuePair; import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient; import org.apache.http.client.entity.UrlEncodedFormEntity; import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost; import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient; import org.apache.http.message.BasicNameValuePair; public class SimpleHttpPut { public static void main(String[] args) { HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost post = new HttpPost("http://vogellac2dm.appspot.com/register"); try { List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(1); nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("registrationid", "123456789")); post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs)); HttpResponse response = client.execute(post); BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(response.getEntity().getContent())); String line = ""; while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) { System.out.println(line); } } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } }
The following request adds several parameters to the post request.
package de.vogella.web.httpclient; import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStreamReader; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import org.apache.http.HttpResponse; import org.apache.http.NameValuePair; import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient; import org.apache.http.client.entity.UrlEncodedFormEntity; import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost; import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient; import org.apache.http.message.BasicNameValuePair; public class TestHttpClient { public static void main(String[] args) { HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost post = new HttpPost("https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin"); try { List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(1); nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("Email", "youremail")); nameValuePairs .add(new BasicNameValuePair("Passwd", "yourpassword")); nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("accountType", "GOOGLE")); nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("source", "Google-cURL-Example")); nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("service", "ac2dm")); post.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs)); HttpResponse response = client.execute(post); BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(response.getEntity().getContent())); String line = ""; while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) { System.out.println(line); if (line.startsWith("Auth=")) { String key = line.substring(5); // Do something with the key } } } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } }