How do you create an asynchronous HTTP request in

Question

I'm fairly new to Java, so this may seem obvious to some. I've worked a lot with ActionScript, which is very much event based and I love that. I recently tried to write a small bit of Java code that does a POST request, but I've been faced with the problem that it's a synchronous request, so the code execution waits for the request to complete, time out or present an error.

How can I create an asynchronous request, where the code continues the execution and a callback is invoked when the HTTP request is complete? I've glanced at threads, but I'm thinking it's overkill.

Answer 1

Based on a link to Apache HTTP Components on this SO thread, I came across the Fluent facade API for HTTP Components. An example there shows how to set up a queue of asynchronous HTTP requests (and get notified of their completion/failure/cancellation). In my case, I didn't need a queue, just one async request at a time.

Here's where I ended up (also using URIBuilder from HTTP Components, example here).

import java.net.URI;
import java.net.URISyntaxException;
import java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService;
import java.util.concurrent.Executors;
import java.util.concurrent.Future;
import org.apache.http.client.fluent.Async;
import org.apache.http.client.fluent.Content;
import org.apache.http.client.fluent.Request;
import org.apache.http.client.utils.URIBuilder;
import org.apache.http.concurrent.FutureCallback;

//...

URIBuilder builder = new URIBuilder();
builder.setScheme("http").setHost("myhost.com").setPath("/folder")
    .setParameter("query0", "val0")
    .setParameter("query1", "val1")
    ...;
URI requestURL = null;
try {
    requestURL = builder.build();
} catch (URISyntaxException use) {}

ExecutorService threadpool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(2);
Async async = Async.newInstance().use(threadpool);
final Request request = Request.Get(requestURL);

Future<Content> future = async.execute(request, new FutureCallback<Content>() {
    public void failed (final Exception e) {
        System.out.println(e.getMessage() +": "+ request);
    }
    public void completed (final Content content) {
        System.out.println("Request completed: "+ request);
        System.out.println("Response:\n"+ content.asString());
    }

    public void cancelled () {}
});

Answer 2

Java is indeed more low level than ActionScript. It's like comparing apples with oranges. While ActionScript handles it all transparently "under the hood", in Java you need to manage the asynchronous processing (threading) yourself.

Fortunately, in Java there's the java.util.concurrent API which can do that in a nice manner.

Your problem can basically be solved as follows:

// Have one (or more) threads ready to do the async tasks. Do this during startup of your app.
ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(1); 

// Fire a request.
Future<Response> response = executor.submit(new Request(new URL("http://google.com")));

// Do your other tasks here (will be processed immediately, current thread won't block).
// ...

// Get the response (here the current thread will block until response is returned).
InputStream body = response.get().getBody();
// ...

// Shutdown the threads during shutdown of your app.
executor.shutdown();

wherein Request and Response look like follows:

public class Request implements Callable<Response> {
    private URL url;

    public Request(URL url) {
        this.url = url;
    }

    @Override
    public Response call() throws Exception {
        return new Response(url.openStream());
    }
}

and

public class Response {
    private InputStream body;

    public Response(InputStream body) {
        this.body = body;
    }

    public InputStream getBody() {
        return body;
    }
}

See also:

• Lesson: Concurrency - a java.util.concurrent tutorial.

Answer 3

You may want to take a look at this question: Asynchronous IO in Java?

It looks like your best bet, if you don't want to wrangle the threads yourself is a framework. The previous post mentions Grizzly, https://grizzly.dev.java.net/, and Netty, http://www.jboss.org/netty/.

From the netty docs:

The Netty project is an effort to provide an asynchronous event-driven network application framework and tools for rapid development of maintainable high performance & high scalability protocol servers & clients.

Answer 4

Apache HttpComponents also have an async http client now too:

/**
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
      <artifactId>httpasyncclient</artifactId>
      <version>4.0-beta4</version>
    </dependency>
**/

import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.CharBuffer;
import java.util.concurrent.Future;

import org.apache.http.HttpResponse;
import org.apache.http.impl.nio.client.CloseableHttpAsyncClient;
import org.apache.http.impl.nio.client.HttpAsyncClients;
import org.apache.http.nio.IOControl;
import org.apache.http.nio.client.methods.AsyncCharConsumer;
import org.apache.http.nio.client.methods.HttpAsyncMethods;
import org.apache.http.protocol.HttpContext;

public class HttpTest {

  public static void main(final String[] args) throws Exception {

    final CloseableHttpAsyncClient httpclient = HttpAsyncClients
        .createDefault();
    httpclient.start();
    try {
      final Future<Boolean> future = httpclient.execute(
          HttpAsyncMethods.createGet("http://www.google.com/"),
          new MyResponseConsumer(), null);
      final Boolean result = future.get();
      if (result != null && result.booleanValue()) {
        System.out.println("Request successfully executed");
      } else {
        System.out.println("Request failed");
      }
      System.out.println("Shutting down");
    } finally {
      httpclient.close();
    }
    System.out.println("Done");
  }

  static class MyResponseConsumer extends AsyncCharConsumer<Boolean> {

    @Override
    protected void onResponseReceived(final HttpResponse response) {
    }

    @Override
    protected void onCharReceived(final CharBuffer buf, final IOControl ioctrl)
        throws IOException {
      while (buf.hasRemaining()) {
        System.out.print(buf.get());
      }
    }

    @Override
    protected void releaseResources() {
    }

    @Override
    protected Boolean buildResult(final HttpContext context) {
      return Boolean.TRUE;
    }
  }
}

Answer 5

It has to be made clear the HTTP protocol is synchronous and this has nothing to do with the programming language. Client sends a request and gets a synchronous response.

If you want to an asynchronous behavior over HTTP, this has to be built over HTTP (I don't know anything about ActionScript but I suppose that this is what the ActionScript does too). There are many libraries that could give you such functionality (e.g. Jersey SSE). Note that they do somehow define dependencies between the client and the server as they do have to agree on the exact non standard communication method above HTTP.

If you cannot control both the client and the server or if you don't want to have dependencies between them, the most common approach of implementing asynchronous (e.g. event based) communication over HTTP is using the webhooks approach (you can check this for an example implementation in java).

Hope I helped!

Answer 6

You may also want to look at Async Http Client.