HTTPBuilder Overview
HTTPBuilder is the easiest way to manipulate HTTP-based resources from the JVM.
In a nutshell, HTTPBuilder is a wrapper for Apache's HttpClient, with some (actually, a lot of) Groovy syntactical sugar thrown on top. The request/response model is also inspired by Prototype.js' Ajax.Request.
In short, HTTPBuilder allows you to make HTTP requests like this:
def http = new HTTPBuilder( 'http://ajax.googleapis.com' )
// perform a GET request, expecting JSON response data http.request( GET, JSON ) { uri.path = '/ajax/services/search/web'
uri.query = [ v: '1.0' , q: 'Calvin and Hobbes' ]
headers. 'User-Agent' = 'Mozilla/5.0 Ubuntu/8.10 Firefox/3.0.4'
// response handler for a success response code:
response.success = { resp, json ->
println resp.status
// parse the JSON response object:
json.responseData.results. each {
println " ${it.titleNoFormatting} : ${it.visibleUrl}"
}
}
// handler for any failure status code:
response.failure = { resp ->
println "Unexpected error: ${resp.status} : ${resp.statusLine.reasonPhrase}"
}
} |
But it actually goes much further to handle common tasks such as building and parsing common content-types, handling common content-encodings, and built-in support for common authentication mechanisms. It works equally as well for simple REST-based requests, or ad-hoc web downloads.
Features
- Builder and parser support for XML, JSON, and HTML
- Easy URI manipulation
- Streamlined client for REST interfaces
- Built-in support for GZIP and Deflate content-encoding
- Built-in support for most common authentication schemes
- Status code based response handling
- Convenience methods for GET and POST
- Compatible with Google App Engine
- AsyncHTTPBuilder for asynchronous requests
- Easily extensible API
Components
HTTPBuilder is the main API class which is used to make requests and parse responses. AsyncHTTPBuilder is a subclass of the base HTTPBuilder which transparently delegates all requests to a thread pool for execution. RESTClient extends HTTPBuilder to eliminate the closure definition, to make REST operations particularly easy. Finally, HttpURLClient provides most of HTTPBuilder's intelligent handling in a package that can be used from Google App Engine.
URIBuilder provides a fluent interface for manipulating complex URLs. It is also used internally by HTTPBuilder to handle path and query string modification.
See the JavaDoc for full documentation.
Requirements
- At least Java 1.5. This is because HttpClient 4 requires Java 5.
- Groovy 1.5 or later, although it should work with earlier versions
- JAR dependencies can be found in the packaged distributions linked from the downlo