The Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is perhaps the most significant protocol used on the Internet today. Web services, network-enabled appliances and the growth of network computing continue to expand the role of the HTTP protocol beyond user-driven web browsers, while increasing the number of applications that require HTTP support.
Although the java.net package provides basic functionality for accessing resources via HTTP, it does not provide the full flexibility or functionality needed by many applications.
HttpClient seeks to fill this void by providing an efficient, up-to-date, and feature-rich package implementing the client side of the most recent HTTP standards and recommendations.
The HttpClient application was mainly designed to support anyone who wants to build HTTP-aware client applications such as web service clients, web browsers or systems that leverage or extend the HTTP protocol for distributed communication.
Here are some key features of "HttpClient":
· Standards based, pure Java, implementation of HTTP versions 1.0 and 1.1
· Full implementation of all HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS, and TRACE) in an extensible OO framework.
· Supports encryption with HTTPS (HTTP over SSL) protocol.
· Transparent connections through HTTP proxies.
· Tunneled HTTPS connections through HTTP proxies, via the CONNECT method.
· Basic, Digest authentication schemes. Please note NTLM is supported only partially.
· Plug-in mechanism for custom authentication schemes.
· Pluggable secure socket factories, making it easier to use third party solutions
· Connection management support for use in multi-threaded applications. Supports setting the maximum total connections as well as the maximum connections per host. Detects and closes stale connections.
· Automatic Cookie handling for reading Set-Cookie: headers from the server and sending them back out in a Cookie: header when appropriate.
· Plug-in mechanism for custom cookie policies.
· Request output streams to avoid buffering any content body by streaming directly to the socket to the server.
· Response input streams to efficiently read the response body by streaming directly from the socket to the server.
· Persistent connections using KeepAlive in HTTP/1.0 and persistance in HTTP/1.1
· Direct access to the response code and headers sent by the server.
· The ability to set connection timeouts.
· Source code is freely available under the Apache License.
Requirements:
· Java
What`s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Eliminated Log lookups in short lived objects impairing performance.
· URLEncodedUtils now correctly parses form-url-encoded entities that specify a charset.
· Contributed by Oleg Kalnichevski
· UrlEncodedFormEntity now sets charset on the Content-Type
· header.Contributed by Jared Jacobs
· SO_TIMEOUT is not reset on persistent (re-used) connections.
· Auth state is now correctly updated if a successful NTLM authentication results in a redirect. This is a minor bug as HttpClient manages to recover from the problem automatically.
· Fixed race condition in AbstractClientConnAdapter that makesit possible for an aborted connection to be returned to the pool.
· Removed dependency on jcip-annotations.jar.
