Use HTTPClient or HttpUrlConnection? [closed]

Question

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.

Closed 4 years ago.

We're implementing a REST client on JRE 1.4.

Seems two good options for a client REST framework are HttpClient and HttpUrlConnection.

Is there a reason to use HttpClient over the JRE's HttpUrlConnection?

Answer 1

The Restlet Framework also has an API which works both server-side and client-side. We support pluggable client connectors, leveraging HttpURLConnection or Apache HTTP Client or our own internal HTTP client.

Our ClientResource class provides a higher level HTTP client API, with features like automatic redirection, transparent conversion between objects and representations, content negotiation and more.

Best regards,

Jerome Louvel

Restlet ~ Founder and Lead developer ~ http://www.restlet.org

Noelios Technologies ~ Co-founder ~ http://www.noelios.com

Answer 2

In my experience HttpClient is slightly easier and more intuitive to use than using HttpUrlConnection, but I think it's a very subjective decision and YMMV.

Answer 3

The HttpUrlConnection is easy to handle. REST implementations are quite simple.

Although you must consider the whole environment about this implementation and check what will work better for you.

Answer 4

I'll give you a single, concrete reason to favour Apache's HTTPClient over the JDK implementation: The JDK's HttpUrlConnection doesn't support timeouts*, Apache's HTTPClient does.

Applications should always have the ability to set timeouts when calling into other systems (databases, remote services, your own server backend, ...).

* This was fixed in Java 1.5; Java 1.5 and higher support timeouts in HttpUrlConnection.

Answer 5

I would recommend Jakarta Commons HTTP Client over java.net.HttpUrlConnection as it is more mature and has a richer feature set. For example you can ask it to set up multi-threaded connection pool (see MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager), and it has full support for all the HTTP methods (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS, TRACE).

Answer 6

... httpclient does not support kerberos/ntlm authentication for proxies etc... java's httpurlconnection will do authentication out of the box...