The Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP) is ubiquitous; this
protocol is at the core of important technologies such as the
World
Wide Web (WWW), the Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP), XML databases, content management
systems, WebDAV, and, most importantly, iTunes. Much of the
world’s business is accomplished over HTTP in some
form or another, and if this protocol were to suddenly vanish, a
sizable portion of the world economy would vanish with it. Given this
ubiquity, it is likely that you’ve had occasion to
write a Java program that needed to fetch a web page or interact with
a servlet or CGI script. While the J2SE contains some rudimentary
tools to communicate via HTTP, the feature set of
URLConnection
is somewhat limited. This chapter
introduces Jakarta HttpClient, a set of utilities that simplifies the
task of retrieving and sending information over HTTP.
Jakarta HttpClient grew up in the Jakarta Commons, and until April 2004 it was a Commons project. It has only recently graduated to a full Jakarta project, and it is still visible as a part of the Jakarta Commons subproject. This chapter refers to HttpClient as Jakarta HttpClient, but you should be aware that most of the documentation and support still refer to the project as Jakarta Commons HttpClient until the project has successfully migrated out of the Jakarta Commons.
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