A simple convenience library for using a HttpURLConnection to make requests and access the response.

This library is available under the MIT License.

The http-request library is available from Maven Central.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.github.kevinsawicki</groupId>
  <artifactId>http-request</artifactId>
  <version>6.0</version>
</dependency>

Not using Maven? Simply copy the HttpRequest class into your project, update the package declaration, and you are good to go.

Javadocs are available here.

See here for a list of known projects using this library.

This library was written to make HTTP requests simple and easy when using a HttpURLConnection.

Libraries like Apache HttpComponents are great but sometimes for either simplicity, or perhaps for the environment you are deploying to (Android), you just want to use a good old-fashioned HttpURLConnection. This library seeks to add convenience and common patterns to the act of making HTTP requests such as a fluid-interface for building requests and support for features such as multipart requests.

Bottom line: The single goal of this library is to improve the usability of the HttpURLConnection class.

None. The goal of this library is to be a single class class with some inner static classes. The test project does require Jetty in order to test requests against an actual HTTP server implementation.

The HttpRequest class does not throw any checked exceptions, instead all low-level exceptions are wrapped up in a HttpRequestException which extends RuntimeException. You can access the underlying exception by catching HttpRequestException and calling getCause() which will always return the original IOException.

No. The underlying HttpUrlConnection object that each HttpRequest object wraps has a synchronous API and therefore all methods on HttpRequest are also synchronous.

Therefore it is important to not use an HttpRequest object on the main thread of your application.

Here is a simple Android example of using it from an AsyncTask:

private class DownloadTask extends AsyncTask<String, Long, File> {
  protected File doInBackground(String... urls) {
    try {
      HttpRequest request =  HttpRequest.get(urls[0]);
      File file = null;
      if (request.ok()) {
        file = File.createTempFile("download", ".tmp");
        request.receive(file);
        publishProgress(file.length());
      }
      return file;
    } catch (HttpRequestException exception) {
      return null;
    }
  }

  protected void onProgressUpdate(Long... progress) {
    Log.d("MyApp", "Downloaded bytes: " + progress[0]);
  }

  protected void onPostExecute(File file) {
    if (file != null)
      Log.d("MyApp", "Downloaded file to: " + file.getAbsolutePath());
    else
      Log.d("MyApp", "Download failed");
  }
}

new DownloadTask().execute("http://google.com");

int response = HttpRequest.get("http://google.com").code();